Beijing-Sana
Archaeologists in northeast China have discovered fossils of the skeletons of a new 125-million-year-old dinosaur species that were trapped by a volcanic eruption while relaxing in their burrows.
Pascal Godfroit, a paleontologist from the Royal Belgian Institute for Natural Sciences, said in statements to the Belgian scientific journal Beer, that these animals were covered with soft sediments while they were still alive or immediately after their death, noting that what happened to the dinosaurs is very similar to what happened in Pompeii, Italy, which preserved bodies. Residents of the village after the eruption of a huge volcano.
Godfroit noted that the characteristics of the dinosaur's skeleton showed that it was able to dig burrows, just as rabbits do today.
Scientists concluded that the dinosaur, which they called Shang Min meaning (eternal sleep) in Chinese, lived during the Cretaceous period and that it was a small herbivore that could run very quickly, based on the length of its tail and the formation of its leg, where the length of one dinosaur reached 1.2 meters.
