Central America's only dinosaur fossil was discovered in Honduras in 1971

Abstract

In 1971, Gregory Horne, an American geologist from Wesleyan University, discovered in Honduras the only dinosaur fossil ever found in Central America during a geological research expedition near San Luis, Comayagua (Zúniga, 2017). The fossil, a femur from an ornithopod hadrosaurid dinosaur, is currently housed at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. (Smithsonian Institution) under the catalog number USNM PAL 181339 (Reproduced with permission). Its identification was confirmed by renowned paleontologists such as Jack McIntosh and John R. Horner (Horner, 1994). The fossil suggests a potential biological exchange of dinosaurs between North and South America (Rage, 1981), posing a challenge to theories regarding the geological formation of Central America.