#fona

here's today's #Paleostream sketches!!! feels good to be back, today we drew Isotelus rex, Coahuilasaurus, Fona, and Goyocephale

Practice drawing my Fenrir design again, just in case. I think I may or may not make him look older…

.

F is for...?

All of the F names in my Paleo Party! Are there any I'm missing? (I've gotta be, this is legit my entire list of F names)

(Reconstructed skull of Fona herzogae, from Avrahami et al., 2024)

Meaning of name: Fona = Fo'na [ancestor of the CHamoru people in their oral history]; herzogae = for Lisa Herzog [discoverer of one of the localities where Fona specimens have been found]

Age: Late Cretaceous (Cenomanian), between about 99.17–99.52 million years ago

Where found: Cedar Mountain Formation, Utah, U.S.A.

How much is known: Remains of at least five individuals, including nearly complete skeletons.

Notes: Fona was a thescelosaurid, a group of relatively small (sheep-sized or smaller), bipedal ornithischians ("bird-hipped" dinosaurs). Thescelosaurids were traditionally thought to have been ornithopods (a group that includes the duck-billed hadrosaurids, among others), but several recent studies suggest that they were equally closely related to both ornithopods and marginocephalians (the group uniting the horned ceratopsians and dome-headed pachycephalosaurs).

Fona exhibits many potential adaptations for digging burrows, including enlarged attachment points for muscles on the shoulders and increased fusion among the hip vertebrae and pelvic bones. Some of these same features and direct evidence of preserved burrow structures have been reported for another thescelosaurid that lived at around the same time, the closely related Oryctodromeus of Montana and Idaho. If Fona also lived in burrows, being buried in them may explain why its fossils are so abundantly and completely preserved, considering that remains of small dinosaurs are otherwise uncommon at the sites where it has been found.

A range of minor anatomical differences can be observed among different individuals of Fona. Some of these differences might represent sexual dimorphism or features that changed during growth, but further research is needed to identify the most likely explanations for them.