A fossil skull found at New Mexico’s Ghost Ranch in 1982 spent more than three decades forgotten in a museum drawer before an undergraduate student brought it back to life — and discovered it belonged to a dinosaur that, by all logic, should not have been there.
The skull, now identified as a new species called Ptychotherates bucculentus, belongs to one of the last known members of Herrerasauria, one of the earliest families of carnivorous dinosaurs. Its discovery, published Tuesday in Papers in Palaeontology, forces a rethink of one of the most consequential events in the history of life on Earth.
“This forces us to reconsider the impact of the end-Triassic extinction as something that wiped out not just the competitors to dinosaurs, but some long-standing dinosaur lineages themselves,” said Simba Srivastava, the Virginia Tech undergraduate geosciences student who led the research.
The end-Triassic extinction, which occurred roughly 201 million years ago, is the event most commonly credited with clearing the way for dinosaurs to dominate the planet. Crocodile ancestors, early mammal relatives, and a host of other animals were wiped out, leaving an ecological opening that dinosaurs rushed to fill. “Dinosaurs go from being co-stars to the headliner,” Srivastava said in a statement released by Virginia Tech.
But Ptychotherates complicates that story. The fossil was found in rock layers dating to just before the extinction boundary, and no herrerasaurian dinosaur has ever been found in younger rocks. That means the same extinction event that handed dinosaurs the world also extinguished at least one of their own ancient lineages — a branch that had been evolving for tens of millions of years.
The species’ name reflects both its anatomy and its fate. Ptychotherates means “folded hunter” in Greek, a nod to the crushed and crumpled state of the skull, while bucculentus is Latin for “with full cheeks” — a reference to the specimen’s unusually tall cheekbones. A paleo-artist who reviewed the reconstruction offered a more vivid description: “murder muppet.” It is a nickname that fits.
The skull was first unearthed from the Coelophysis Quarry at Ghost Ranch — a site famous for mass deposits of the small Triassic dinosaur Coelophysis — by a crew from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in 1982. It sat in the museum’s collection for more than thirty years until Virginia Tech palaeobiologist Sterling Nesbitt rediscovered it in storage and brought it to Blacksburg for analysis. Nesbitt and his colleague Michelle Stocker then assigned the project to Srivastava when he was still in his first year of study.
What followed was two years of painstaking digital reconstruction. Srivastava used computed tomography scanning data to digitally separate the crushed bones, then 3D-printed a physical model of the skull. The specimen itself is barely the size of a person’s two hands held together.
What emerged from the reconstruction was unlike anything previously seen among early dinosaurs: a wide braincase, massive cheekbones, and a short, deep snout that appear to represent an entirely new morphological experiment in carnivore evolution at the very end of the Triassic.
At the time, dinosaurs were not yet dominant. They competed for resources alongside early crocodile relatives and the forerunners of mammals in a world still working out who would inherit it.
The fossil is also notable for where it was found. No other herrerasaurian dinosaur has been recovered this far north or this late in the Triassic, suggesting that what is now the American Southwest may have served as the group’s last refuge. The Coelophysis Quarry site appears to have been where this ancient lineage made its final stand before the extinction swept them away along with so much else.
Only one specimen of Ptychotherates exists.
“This specimen, it fits in my hands, but it is the only proof that any of these dinosaurs lived this long, lived in these latitudes, the only proof that they evolved to have this skull shape,” Srivastava said in a statement released by Virginia Tech. “All these billions of individuals that existed through time are spoken for by this one specimen.”
The finding adds a new dimension to the story of the end-Triassic extinction. For decades the event has been cast as the moment that cleared the stage for dinosaurs. Ptychotherates suggests the reality was messier. The extinction did not simply hand dinosaurs their crown. It also took something from them.
Sources
Primary source
Srivastava, S. & Nesbitt, S.J. (2026). A new taxon of saurischian dinosaur from the Coelophysis Quarry of New Mexico, USA (Triassic: latest Norian or Rhaetian) highlights herrerasaurian diversity in the latest Triassic. Papers in Palaeontology, 12(2). https://doi.org/10.1002/spp2.70069
Press release
Virginia Tech. (15 April 2026). Student identifies new meat-eating dinosaur three times older than T. rex. https://news.vt.edu/articles/2026/01/science-murder-muppet.html
Jane holds a BSc in Biology from the University of Regina and a Master of Science in Bioscience, Technology and Public Policy from the Univesity of Winnipeg. Her reporting interests include Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and the Cosmos.