Since their discovery in 2007, 85 percent of the most complete dinosaur fossils, which Mississippi officials have described as "extremely rare," are still buried underground.
Paleontologists have confirmed that the specimen was once a duck-billed dinosaur that lived 82 million years ago: a family of herbivorous, duck-billed dinosaurs.
But duck-billed dragons were a large family of herbivorous behemoths — including, according to experts, at least 61 identified individual species, and possibly hundreds of unique species that once roamed the planet.
Researchers have found the specimen's vertebrae, forearm section, foot, and pelvic bone, but the rest are difficult to excavate from its site near Boonville in the state's northeastern state.
"This thing has been sitting out for a long time because we don't have anyone to deal with it," admitted James Starnes, an official with the state's geological office.
Nearly two decades ago, exactly what kind of duck-billed dragon was excavated in the Boonville area of Mississippi remains a mystery.
But researchers are now turning to a 3D forensic skeletal analysis method to solve the mystery before it is fully unearthed.
Derek Hoffman, a graduate student in geology at the University of Southern Mississippi (USM), is analyzing the remains of a duck-billed dragon using a method known as "geometric morphometry" in several scientific fields.
"What geometric morphometry does," Hoffman explains, "is a method of morphological analysis. ”
Identify key features, or "markers," for a given sample of bones, and then compare these distances and their ratios through sophisticated statistical models to confirm differences and similarities with known bones.
This method has also been shown to be effective in anthropology as well as in human evolutionary research, including the comparison of the brain chambers of modern humans with those of our Neanderthal ancestors.
But Hoffman's quest for this duck-billed drump fossil was made more difficult by the fact that some of the remains were in the hands of private collectors.
Hoffman's work focused on skeletons publicly held at the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science.
"We have quite a bit of spine," George Phillips, the museum's curator of paleontology, told the local newspaper, The Horn Chronicle. "We have a piece of the humerus."
"We have an ulna. The ulna is the back of the forearm. ”
"We've got some foot bones," Phillips continued, "and then we've got pubic bones. ”
The ulna of an adult duck-billed dragon was about two feet long, and its humerus was about a foot and a half long. And a full-fledged adult duck-billed drumsaur can weigh more than 50 pounds in total foot bones.
But to the dismay of the researchers, the dinosaur's skull — the most distinctive feature that distinguishes the duck-billed dragon species — has yet to be found.
Different species of duck-billed dragons are known to have evolved a variety of wide and peculiar crests on their duckbills, and even have a soft substance like a rooster's red crest.
Paleontologists are still discussing the biological role that these unusual and sometimes conspicuous features may have, but their diversity adds to the recorded diversity of the duck-billed dragon family.
USM's Hoffman focused on the dinosaur's pubic bone, a bone from the front of the pelvis, as the best option to identify this fossil species.
While the differences between the pubic bones of different species of duck-billed dinosaurs are subtle and often imperceptible to the naked eye, their hidden distinctions can be revealed through rigorous mathematical methods such as geometric morphometry.
The USM graduate geology student hopes to at least reduce the number of duck-billed dragon species that the Mississippi fossil may belong to.
Or, in Hoffman's words, "We can get this duck-billed dragon down to the lowest classification level." ”
The currently known information about this particular duck-billed dragon is that when it stands on its hind legs, it may have been about 7.62~7.92 meters long and about 4.9 meters tall.
Researchers believe that the duck-billed dragon lineage originated in North America, but these herbivores eventually migrated across the globe, with fossils found in Asia, South America, Europe, and North Africa.
"They are the most representative dinosaurs in the fossil record," Hoffman said, "without a doubt." ”
The name duck-billed dragon derives from the ancient Greek word for "stout lizard", and these heavy animals do weigh between 2,000 and 4,000 kilograms.
Many duck-billed dragon species lived between 75 million and 65 million years ago in the Late Cretaceous.
Other dinosaur examples of the duck-billed dragon family include the Parasaurus dundrosaurus, which had a long, backward-curved crest on its head and was featured in the 2022 film Jurassic World: Dominion, and the Edmontonsaurus, which had a crown made up of soft tissue like a rooster.
James Starnes, an official with the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality's Office of Geology, said the duck-billed dragon found near Boonville in 2007 was "extremely rare."
"We don't have a lot of bones," Stearns said. "We have some fragmented parts, but no complete bones."
Stearns hopes that despite the fact that it took nearly two decades to excavate a small portion of the duck-billed dinosaur fossil, the project will one day be completed.
"We're still digging up more parts of this specimen," Stearns said.