Pennies are not apart of a complete breakfast, eat your veggies.. not money

One of the smallest dinosaur skulls ever discovered has been identified and described by a team of scientists from London, Cambridge and Chicago. The skull would have been only 45 millimeters (less than two inches) in length. It belonged to a very young Heterodontosaurus, an early dinosaur. This juvenile weighed about 200 grams, less than two sticks of butter…

In the Fall issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, the researchers describe important findings from this skull that suggest how and when the ornithischians, the family of herbivorous dinosaurs that includes Heterodontosaurus, made the transition from eating meat to eating plants.

“It’s likely that all dinosaurs evolved from carnivorous ancestors,” said study co-author Laura Porro, a post-doctoral student at the University of Chicago. “Since heterodontosaurs are among the earliest dinosaurs adapted to eating plants, they may represent a transition phase between meat-eating ancestors and more sophisticated, fully-herbivorous descendents.”

“This juvenile skull,” she added, “indicates that these dinosaurs were still in the midst of that transition.”

Heterodontosaurus lived during the Early Jurassic period (about 190 million years ago) of South Africa. Adult Heterodontosaurs were turkey-sized animals, reaching just over three feet in length and weighing around five to six pounds.

Because their fossils are very rare, Heterodontosaurus and its relatives (the heterodontosaurs) are poorly understood compared to later and larger groups of dinosaurs.

“There were only two known fossils of Heterodontosaurus, both in South Africa and both adults,” said Porro, who is completing her doctoral dissertation on feeding in Heterodontosaurus under the supervision of David Norman, researcher at the University of Cambridge and co-author of the study. “There were rumors of a juvenile heterodontosaur skull in the collection of the South African Museum,” she said, “but no one had ever described it.”

As part of her research, Porro visited the Iziko South African Museum, Cape Town, to examine the adult fossils. When she was there, she got permission to “poke around” in the Museum’s collections. While going through drawers of material found during excavations in the 1960s, she found two more heterodontosaur fossils, including the partial juvenile skull.

“I didn’t recognize it as a dinosaur at first,” she said, “but when I turned it over and saw the eye looking straight at me, I knew exactly what it was.”

more via sciencedaily