Meet Labocania
In the spirit of my habit of bringing rare, obscure dinosaurs to your attention, I’d like to introduce you to Labocania anomala , a theropod dinosaur from the peninsula of Baja California. A well-kept secret of paleontology, Baja California is rich in fossils of the Late Cretaceous period, about 70 or so million years ago. Compared with “Alta California”, a slang name often given to our own state of California, Baja contains approximately twice as many Cretaceous dinosaurs in the northern half of the peninsula than the entire state does as a whole. In addition to Labocania, the peninsula has also revealed specimens of Lambeosaurus , Albertosaurus , and even specimens of strange polyglyphanodont lizards, strange iguana-like herbivores related to skinks. But what kind of theropod is Labocania ? That’s what makes Labocania so fascinating, the fact that we don’t know. Gregory S. Paul has suggested that Labocania was an allosaur, a Late Cretaceous specimen of a group that was supposed to ...