New Dinosaur Species Discovered At State Museum In Harrisburg

HARRISBURG, Pa. (CBS) - A new dinosaur species has been discovered by researchers working at the state museum in Harrisburg.

The state museum has an exhibit that allows visitors to watch a technician chipping through rock to find fossil remains. The state museum had borrowed an 8 foot by 8 foot mudstone block that Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum had acquired from New Mexico. Dr. Robert Sullivan, the state museum's curator of paleontology and geology, says some years ago, the museum's "preparator" told him he'd found another dinosaur fossil.

"He mentioned that he'd found another skull of Coelophysis. And about two weeks later, I went up to look at it, and I saw that it was not Coelophysis."

And now, after years of review by a team of pre-eminent paleontologists, the skull has been deemed that of a previously unknown dinosaur named Daemonosaurus, a smallish dinosaur, only about four to five feet long, from the Late Triassic period some 220 million years ago.

Reported by Tony Romeo, KYW Newsradio