DinoFrontier
About Fruitadens
Fruitadens is one of the smallest ornithischian (bird-hipped) dinosaurs ever found, about the length of a house cat and lighter than a bag of sugar. It lived in the Morrison Formation alongside giants like Brachiosaurus and Apatosaurus.
It belonged to the heterodontosaurids, a family of small, early ornithischians with different kinds of teeth: small front teeth, a pair of fang-like teeth, and leaf-shaped cheek teeth further back.
That mixed set of teeth suggests Fruitadens was an omnivore, eating plants, seeds and insects, and possibly small animals too.
Fruitadens facts
- It is named after the town of Fruita, Colorado, near where it was found.
- The species name honours the Haaga family, supporters of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.
- It is one of the youngest heterodontosaurids known; the family first appeared in the Early Jurassic.
- Its bones were collected decades before it was formally named and described.
Discovery
George Callison and his team collected the remains at the Fruita Paleontological Area in western Colorado in the late 1970s and 1980s. They sat in museum collections until Richard Butler and colleagues described them as a new dinosaur in 2010.
