Julia Clarke: I\u2019m going to add to that, I\u2019ll 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.<\/p>\n
And there are different data sets that help you do that, but it\u2019s 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\u2019t have another representative of a previously described species.<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 a new dinosaur species described from Korea in how many years is it, Jongyun?<\/p>\n
Jongyun Jung: After 15 years.<\/p>\n
In 15 years, so it\u2019s pretty remarkable. Well, I know much of the research around this fossil was done there at UT Austin. <\/p>\n
Dr. Clarke, can you share a bit about the role of the geosciences department there and what it did in undertaking this study?<\/p>\n
Julia Clarke: It\u2019s been a really fun collaboration and I\u2019ll go back a little bit further in time.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s very cool, but I can\u2019t tell what it is. And I could see that this rock was really, really hard and the bones actually softer than the surrounding rock.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
And I think that\u2019s where we had the totally crazy \u201ca-ha\u201d moment where Dr. Jung and colleagues were looking inside the block and they\u2019re like, \u201cwe have a skull.\u201d And that was just very cool.<\/p>\n