Texas' official dinosaur was faking it

DALLAS, Oct. 3 (UPI) -- The bones of Texas' official dinosaur have been identified as belonging to a completely different species than previously thought, a report said.

The Dallas Morning News reported Wednesday that while the purported pleurocoelus was named the Official Dinosaur of Texas a decade ago, a graduate student recently learned that the bones that bore that honor actually belonged to another dinosaur species.

Former Southern Methodist University graduate student Peter Rose said he came across the labeling discrepancy accidentally while studying the prehistoric remains.

"I wasn't going in with any assumptions. I thought that what I was looking at was the pleurocoelus," he said.

"But in the process of describing the bones, I came to the conclusion that it had to be something really different," Rose added.

Rose found the bones did not belong to the plant-eating dinosaur species pleurocoelus, but rather were the remains of an unknown species he named paluxysaurus.

The newspaper said that with other scientists supporting Rose's findings, a change in the state's official dinosaur is likely to occur.