Gnatalie is the only green-boned dinosaur discovered on the planet. She will be exhibited in Los Angeles

The latest dinosaur to be housed at the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History isn’t just a member of a new species; it’s also the only dinosaur discovered on the planet with green bones, museum officials say.

Named “Gnatalie” (pronounced Natalie) because of the midges that swarmed during the excavation, the fossils of the long-necked, long-tailed herbivorous dinosaur got their unique coloration, a mottled dark olive green, from the mineral celadonite during the fossilization process.

Fossils are usually brown because of silica or black because of iron minerals. Green is rare because celadonite forms under volcanic or hydrothermal conditions that usually destroy buried bones. Celadonite entered fossils when volcanic activity about 50 to 80 million years ago made it hot enough to replace a previous mineral.

The dinosaur lived 150 million years ago, during the late Jurassic period, making it older than Tyrannosaurus rex, which lived 66 to 68 million years ago.

Researchers discovered the bones in 2007 in the Utah Badlands.

“Dinosaurs are a great way to teach our visitors about the nature of science, and what better way to engage them in the process of scientific discovery and get them thinking about the wonders of the world we live in than with an 80-foot-long green dinosaur!” Luis M. Chiappe of the museum’s Dinosaur Institute said in a statement about his team’s discovery.

Matt Wedel, an anatomist and paleontologist at Western University of Health Sciences in Pomona, near Los Angeles, said he heard “rumors of a green dinosaur when I was in college.”

When he saw the bones while they were still being cleaned, he said they were “like nothing I’ve ever seen.”

The dinosaur resembles a species of sauropod called Diplodocus, and the discovery will be published in a scientific paper next year. The sauropod, which refers to a family of massive herbivores that includes Brontosaurus and Brachiosaurus, will be the museum’s largest dinosaur and will be on display this fall in its new visitor center.

John Whitlock, who teaches at Mount Aloysius College, a private Catholic college in Cresson, Pennsylvania, and researches sauropods, said it’s exciting to have such a complete skeleton to help fill in the gaps in specimens that are less complete.

“It’s extremely broad, it really adds to our ability to understand both taxonomic diversity…but also anatomical diversity,” Whitlock said.

The dinosaur was named “Gnatalie” last month after the museum asked the public to vote on five choices that included Verdi, derived from the Latin word for green; Olive, after the small green fruit that symbolizes peace, joy and strength in many cultures; Esme, short for Esmerelda, which means emerald in Spanish; and Sage, a Los Angeles green plant that is also grown in the Natural History Museum’s nature gardens.

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