UT Austin researchers discover new dinosaur species in Korea

Around a hundred million years ago, a small, possibly fuzzy baby dinosaur about two years old died amid the harsh Cretaceous landscape.

Fast forward to now, and that little dinosaur is now the center of an exciting new discovery in Korea involving researchers from the University of Texas at Austin.

It’s called the Doolysaurus, named for a popular Korean children’s television character, and it’s being hailed as a new species of baby dinosaur.

Jongyun Jung, a visiting postdoctoral researcher at UT’s Jackson School of Geosciences and Dr. Julia Clarke, a professor at the Jackson School, joined Texas Standard to discuss the finding. Listen to the interview in the player above or read the transcript below.

This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:

Texas Standard: So when did you realize you had a new species and how did you feel at that moment?

Jongyun Jung: Yeah, actually my research background was the fossil footprints and kinds of their footprints and tracks. But yeah, I’m always dreaming to finding new dinosaur species by my hands.

So when we found this character, after we excavate these dinosaur fossils and scanning this specimen, we figured out very different character with other dinosaur species.

And yeah, this is the one of the very important moments in my life.

Julia Clarke: I’m going to add to that, I’ll just say that figuring out whether you have a new species, it might be interesting to know, is not an easy process because you have to compare the attributes of the new specimen, the new skeleton, to all other known dinosaurs.

And there are different data sets that help you do that, but it’s like you have to look at every bump on every bone, at the characteristics of every part of the skull to make sure that you don’t have another representative of a previously described species.

So when we finally had that evidence and we could clearly say that this was a new species, yeah, it was a very exciting moment. I mean, given this is the first — a new dinosaur species described from Korea in how many years is it, Jongyun?

Jongyun Jung: After 15 years.

In 15 years, so it’s pretty remarkable. Well, I know much of the research around this fossil was done there at UT Austin.

Dr. Clarke, can you share a bit about the role of the geosciences department there and what it did in undertaking this study?

Julia Clarke: It’s been a really fun collaboration and I’ll go back a little bit further in time.

I was visiting Korea to give a seminar at the home university of the Korean Dinosaur Center and Jongyun and his colleagues showed me the fossil in the block and I was like, wow, that’s very cool, but I can’t tell what it is. And I could see that this rock was really, really hard and the bones actually softer than the surrounding rock.

And so I was like, this is a great candidate for CAT scanning or CT scanning, using x-rays to see inside the block. And so, I invited Dr. Jung and his colleagues to come to UT and we would CT scan the fossil.

And I think that’s where we had the totally crazy “a-ha” moment where Dr. Jung and colleagues were looking inside the block and they’re like, “we have a skull.” And that was just very cool.

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Dr. Clarke since, as we mentioned, this is being hailed as a new species of baby dinosaur, tell us about what this discovery means to our evolving understanding of the dinosaur world.

Julia Clarke: Yeah, it’s very cool. You have, essentially, in the Korean Peninsula, you have a chance to sample Far East Asian dinosaurs from this really key time interval, which is this mid-Cretaceous time. And this is a time period where there’s a lot of exchange between what we now… You know, Eurasia and North America.

And so what is really neat about the new species is it samples part of a lineage that has representatives both in North America during this time period and Asia, but it fills in kind of another piece of that story. It tells us more about the connections between those species on these two, what are today, very distant continents.

Tell us what this dinosaur looks like. You mentioned it’s a baby, but what are some of the characteristics?

Julia Clarke: Well, the first thing I’d mention is that this dinosaur would fit on your desk. It’s a desk-sized dinosaur. It’s comfortably, maybe the size of a small dog or a large cat.

So it’s not a particularly large animal. Of course, dinosaurs are not closely related to mammals. They are… Birds are living dinosaurs. Other parts of the group of dinosaurs that this, that Doolysaurus is a part of, were fuzzy. And so we don’t have fuzz preserved in the actual fossil, in this case, but we know that relatives of Doolysaurus were fuzzy.

And Jongyun, what do you hope to learn more about when it comes to this dinosaur?

Jongyun Jung: Actually this site we also find many dinosaur egg fossils, including bird eggs also. So we expecting much more diverse dinosaurs lived in this site and we’re expecting finding new dinosaur fossils in this site.

The newly discovered dinosaur species is named after the popular South Korean cartoon Dooly the Little
Dinosaur. The titular Dooly is on the left. ⓒDoolynara

So, Dr. Jung, we’re calling it “Doolysaurus,” but tell us about the species.

Jongyun Jung: This species’ name is Doolysaurus huhmini and is named after Professor Min Huh from Korea who excavated the first dinosaur nest fossil in this site and also worked on various paleontological projects of Korea over the 30 years.

Julia Clarke: Yeah, to add to Dr. Jung’s comments, the full name of this dinosaur is Doolysaurus huhmini, as he mentioned. And what it references, what I’d like to call out as a key contribution, another key contribution of Dr. Huh Min, is working to preserve fossil sites in Korea.

So, he’s been very active in the UNESCO mission to preserve geoparks and those include a lot of the sites in Korea with these amazing trackways and egg fossils and it’s just been really wonderful to see that effort to conserve paleontological sites.

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