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In 1982, a team from the Carnegie Museum found a crushed skull at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico — no one could identify it, and it was stored in a drawer for over 40 years until a student digitally reconstructed it
According to a study published on April 15, 2026, in the journal Papers in Palaeontology, a crushed fossil abandoned in a museum drawer revealed a completely new species of carnivorous dinosaur.
The animal was named Ptychotherates bucculentus, which in Latin means “folded hunter of full cheeks.”
And it shouldn’t have existed during that period in Earth’s history.
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A crushed skull that no one could decipher
The story begins in 1982, when a team from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History found the fossil during an excavation at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico.
Ghost Ranch is one of the richest paleontological sites in the world for the Triassic period, the era that preceded the giant dinosaurs.
But the skull was so crushed and deformed that no one could classify it.
It was cataloged, packed, and placed in a museum drawer. There it remained for over three decades, untouched.
The professor who opened the right drawer
More than 30 years later, paleontologist Sterling Nesbitt, a professor at Virginia Tech, rediscovered the fossil during a collection review at the Carnegie Museum.
Nesbitt noticed that there was something unusual about that destroyed skull.
He took the material to his lab and handed it to Simba Srivastava, an undergraduate student in Geosciences.
Srivastava used computed tomography to scan the crushed fragments, digitally separated each bone, and printed a 3D reconstruction of the complete skull.
The result surprised the entire team.
A dinosaur fossil that shouldn’t exist at that time
The reconstructed skull revealed an animal with enormous cheeks, a wide cranial box, and a short, deep snout.
These features had never been seen in such primitive dinosaurs.
The Ptychotherates belongs to the group of herrerasaurids, considered among the first carnivorous dinosaurs on Earth.
As reported by SciTechDaily, herrerasaurids were considered a small and poorly diversified group at the end of the Triassic, about 201 million years ago.
The discovery of Ptychotherates proves that this group was much more diverse than previously thought — with radically different forms coexisting in the same period.
Therefore, it is like discovering that, in the same neighborhood and at the same time, distant cousins with completely opposite appearances lived.
The “murder muppet” of Ghost Ranch
The appearance of Ptychotherates is so unusual that a paleoartist described it as a “murder muppet.”
With its flattened snout, inflated cheeks, and relatively large eyes, the animal looked more like a cartoon character than a Triassic predator.
But it was a carnivore. The dental arches and skull structure leave no doubt: Ptychotherates hunted.
Moreover, the combination of cute features with predatory instinct is the kind of contradiction that fascinates paleontologists around the world.
Why a dinosaur fossil forgotten in a drawer matters
The discovery has implications that go beyond curiosity.
It shows that the early dinosaurs were much more varied than the fossil record has suggested so far.
If a single crushed skull, forgotten for 40 years, revealed an entirely new species with never-before-seen features, how many other similar fossils might be stored in museums around the world?
In this way, museum collections often contain specimens that have never been studied with the modern tools available today.
Computed tomography and 3D printing are revealing secrets in fossils that previous generations of scientists simply did not have access to.
- Scientific name: Ptychotherates bucculentus
- Meaning: “Folded hunter of full cheeks”
- Period: Late Triassic (~201 million years)
- Location: Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, USA
- Original discovery: 1982, Carnegie Museum of Natural History
- Reconstruction: 2026, Virginia Tech (Simba Srivastava)
- Publication: Papers in Palaeontology, April 2026
The lesson that was kept for 40 years
The Deinosuchus, the 10-meter giant crocodile that hunted dinosaurs, also spent decades being underestimated before its true size was confirmed.
And the giant echidna from Australia was forgotten for 119 years in a cave before being rediscovered.
The Ptychotherates adds another chapter to this tradition of late discoveries.
Science, at times, does not need new expeditions.
Moreover, the Ptychotherates lived at the end of the Triassic, about 201 million years ago — a period just before the great extinction that made way for the giant dinosaurs that would dominate the Jurassic.
In this sense, the discovery suggests that the early carnivores of Earth were evolving much more diverse forms than previously imagined, just before the event that would exterminate most of them.
Consequently, the Ptychotherates may represent one of the last evolutionary experiments of the herrerasaurids — a group that tried multiple anatomical paths before being swept away by extinction.
Similarly, the computed tomography technique used by Srivastava is revealing secrets in fossils from museums around the world. Skulls that seemed irretrievable can now be digitally separated, bone by bone, and reconstructed on 3D printers.
Therefore, the future of paleontology may not lie in new expeditions to remote lands, but in the basements and drawers of institutions that have accumulated decades of unstudied material.
Above all, the case of Ptychotherates shows that a single undergraduate student, armed with modern technology, can solve mysteries that generations of experts could not — simply because they did not have the right tools.
In this way, how many other “murder muppets” are waiting inside museum drawers to be rediscovered? Science is sometimes closer than we think. We just need to look at what has already been found.
Likewise, the importance of historical collections in museums has never been more evident. Therefore, institutions like the Carnegie Museum, the Smithsonian, and the Museum of Zoology at USP hold thousands of specimens that have never undergone tomography.
Thus, each closed drawer is a potential scientific article waiting to be written. Moreover, 3D digitization allows researchers from any country to study the fossils without needing to travel to the original museum.
Just open the right drawer.
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