Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument yielded an articulated skeleton of a baby duck-billed dinosaur, a rare find because the bones remained connected in their natural position.
June excavation teams of scientists and soldiers recovered the fossil from the remote southern Utah site, with Utah Army National Guard helicopters used to lift and transport the bones.
Dr. Randall Irmis of the Natural History Museum of Utah said articulated skeletons are far less common than the isolated bone fragments researchers usually find.
The discovery adds a notable juvenile dinosaur specimen to material recovered from one of Utah’s richest fossil regions.