The Arkansas legislature resolved last year
that Arkansaurus Fridayi was the state’s official dinosaur and that was good. But now the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology has announced the newly recognized creature and that is really official.

It lived in Arkansas 113 million years ago, give or take a few million.

As David Ramsey wrote last year:

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Joe B. Friday discovered the dinosaur’s fossilized foot in a gravel pit near Lockesburg in 1972 when he was out looking for a cow. Arkansaurus, a bipedal coelurosaurian dinosaur, is the only dinosaur whose remains have been found in Arkansas.

Friday donated the bones to the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. They’re now kept in the Arkansas Archeological Survey’s museum collection; casts of the foot can be seen at the Arkansas Geological Survey and the Museum of Discovery in Little Rock. 

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