Is it a duck? No, it is 'one of the cutest dinosaurs'

Dinosaurs aren't exactly the cute types. Even the most docile plant-eating dinos have a towering presence and can crush average human to death in no time. The fiere animosity of the T-Rex is stuff of legends. But now a fossil of what a scientist is calling the 'cutest dinosaur' has come to light.

The fossil is of a dinosaur embryo. A Saurapod to be precise. What's special about this fossil is the the head of the tiny embryo has been found preserved in 3 dimensional projection. Fossils are preserved under enormous pressure of rocks and soil for millions of years. Often this flattens the fossilized material and hence such fossils are found to be in a two-dimentional condition. Moreover, small fossils have greater chance of giving way to the enourmous pressure of rock and soil that preserves it.

This and another aspect of the fossil is a matter of surprise for Martin Kundrat,a paleobiologist at the Center for Interdisciplinary Biosciences at Pavol Jozef Safarik University in Slovakia.

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This type of dinosaurs are not known to have horns. However, a small bump on the snout of this baby dino caught Kundrat and other scientists' attention.

Stephen Brusatte, one of the scientists who was not directly involved in the study said that the Saurapod embryo was one of the "cutest dinosaurs" he had seen. The little bump on the nose of the Saurapod (which may represent a horn) may be the reason why the baby dino was called such. Stephen Brussatte was quoted by The New York Times.

Martin Kundrat along with his associates wrote a paper on this in Current Biology, a scientific journal.

Scientists made another fascinating observation. They noticed that the baby Saurapod had its eyes in the front of the skull. Such an arrangement of eyes, like in humans, gives an animal a better depth perception.

So what's the point? Adults dinosaurs of this type did not have such an arrangement of eyes. They had eyes on either side of their skulls (like, for example in a crow)

This 3-dimensional preservation of Saurapod embryo is bound to shed considerable light on the life of dinosaurs from the embryonic stage to the adulthood.