Crested "beach bum" dinosaur found in Mexico

By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Seventy-two million years ago, a dinosaur with a sail-shaped crest on the top of its head lived at a Mexican seashore, munching plants and trying to avoid a cousin of Tyrannosaurus rex.

U.S., Mexican and Canadian scientists on Tuesday announced the discovery of Velafrons coahuilensis, a duck-billed dinosaur that lived about 7 million years before a big rock from space wiped out the dinosaurs and many other creatures.

"Velafrons was probably a beach bum," said paleontologist Terry Gates of the Utah Museum of Natural History and University of Utah.

Its shoreline home was lush, with rivers flowing into a warm, shallow sea, the scientists said.

"It would have been a beautiful time to have been there -- very warm, very Mediterranean-like," Utah Museum of Natural History paleontologist Scott Sampson told reporters. "But you've got to worry about the tyrannosaurs out there."

Gates said it is the most complete dinosaur ever found in Mexico. He said the scientists in recent expeditions also found a number of other dinosaurs. The fossilized remains of Velafrons were found in rugged, dry terrain in north-central Mexico in the state of Coahuila, near the city of Saltillo.

Sampson said the discovery is helping open a window into life in the late Cretaceous Period on the southern tip of western North America. The continent at the time was sliced in two at the time by a big inland sea stretching from the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico.

'ODD AND FREAKISH'