Which lucky dinosaur has its own website?

A 75.5 million year old juvenile parasaurolophus! (www.dinosaurjoe.org)

Artist's reconstruction of a juvenile parasaurolophus.
Illustration by Lukas Panzarin, from the Joe the Dinosaur website.

A lengthy and detailed description of a new juvenile parasaurolophus from the Late Cretaceous (late Campanian) Kaiparowits Formation in Utah, USA, has just been published on PeerJ by Andy Farke​, Derek J. Chok, Annisa Herrero, Brandon Scolieri, and Sarah Werning.

This fossil represents "...the most complete single individual of Parasaurolophus described to date", and also the smallest (it is a juvenile, remember) Parasaurolophus found so far. Although assigned to the genus Parasaurolophus, it has not been assigned to a particular species, as species are designated on the shape and size of head crests present only in adult forms.

Interpretive drawing and photograph of Parasaurolophus sp., RAM 14000, in left lateral view. The blue area indicates areas of weathered bone, green area indicate bone impressions, and pink indicates skin impressions. Abbreviations: f, femur; fib, fibula; h, humerus; il, ilium; isc, ischium; MT III, metatarsal III; prp, prepubic process; sc, scapula; si, skin impression; tib, tibia. Scale bar equals 10 cm.
Figure from Farke et al., 2013.

Some palaeontologists have suspected that young parasaurolophins did not look like adult parasaurolophins, and this fossil seems to support that theory. This is not an unusual phenomenon: plenty of animals look different in juvenile and adult form. Human babies, for instance, are not born as miniature versions of adult humans (how strange would that look?), but instead have relatively large heads and short limbs, and toothless mouths.

It is also a very taphonomically interesting fossil: not only because of the excellent state of preservation and articulation, but also because of the soft tissue imprints near the snout (not shown on figure above) and the back of the right foot (shown above in pink). The photograph below is from the published paper, and while not the sharpest photo, does seem to show a scale pattern imprinted on the rock.

Image of Parasaurolophus sp. (RAM 14000) skin impressions on the sole of the right foot.
Photograph from Farke et al., 2013.

This fossil has picked up a bit of media and blogger attention (by Nature, The Guardian, SV-POW!, Buzzfeed, etc...), not only because it's a wonderful new specimen, but also because the fossil discovery and research was carried out by high school students working alongside palaeontologists! It was also published in a completely open-access journal, instead of being stuck behind a publisher's pay wall, which may (perhaps) be the way of the future.

Adult and juvenile Parasaurolophus heads to relative scale (life scale would not fit on your screen!). Illustration by Lukas Panzarin, from the Joe the Dinosaur website.

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References

Farke, A. A., Chok, D. J., Herrero, A., Scolieri, B., Werning, S. 2013. Ontogeny in the tube-crested dinosaur Parasaurolophus (Hadrosauridae) and heterochrony in hadrosaurids. PeerJ 1:e182 http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.182