This Fuzzy Baby Dinosaur Was Hiding for 100 Million Years in a Rock in South Korea

EARTH, Laniakea Supercluster—Around 100 million years ago, a small, possibly fluffy dinosaur roughly the size of a turkey died on what is now South Korea’s Aphae Island. It lay entombed in stone for eons, until a team of researchers cracked open its secrets with high‑tech X‑rays and gave it a name borrowed from one of Korea’s most beloved cartoon characters.

Meet Doolysaurus huhmini, a newly identified dinosaur species and the first to be described in South Korea in a decade and a half. The name pays tribute to Dooly, the green, big‑headed baby dinosaur who has starred in the wildly popular Korean cartoon Dooly the Little Dinosaur since the 1980s.

While the fossil was originally discovered in 2023, the findings were just published in March in the peer‑reviewed journal Fossil Record by a team from the Korean Dinosaur Research Center and the University of Texas at Austin.

Jongyun Jung, a visiting postdoctoral researcher at UT Austin involved in the discovery, recalled in a university press release that naming the new species after the familiar Korean cartoon legend was a no‑brainer.

“Dooly is one of the very famous, iconic dinosaur characters in Korea. Every generation in Korea knows this character,” said Jung. “And our specimen is also a juvenile or ‘baby’, so it’s perfect for our dinosaur species name to honor Dooly.”

When the research team discovered the fossil, only a few leg bones and vertebrae were visible. But when the specimen was shipped to UT Austin’s High‑Resolution X‑ray Computed Tomography facility—the first lab in the world to make micro‑CT scanning available to academic researchers—things took an unexpected turn.

Hidden inside the rock were skull fragments, jaw bones, and teeth. It was the first Korean dinosaur fossil ever found with portions of a skull.

Study co‑author Julia Clarke, a paleontology professor at UT Austin, described the creature with a warmth unusual for academic discourse.

“I think it would have been pretty cute,” Clarke said. “It might have looked a bit like a little lamb.”

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Based on growth patterns in its femur bone, the team determined the animal was about two years old at death and still growing rapidly. Scientists classified it as a thescelosaurid—a group of two‑legged, possibly fuzzy dinosaurs that roamed East Asia and North America during the Cretaceous period, between roughly 113 and 94 million years ago.

The researchers were even able to piece together a bit of what Dooly’s life and diet may have been like.

Preserved inside the fossil were dozens of tiny stomach stones, called gastroliths. These stones, which dinosaurs swallowed to aid digestion, suggest Doolysaurus was an omnivore that ate a mix of plants, insects, and small animals.

The real‑life Dooly never saw a TV screen, a subway ad, or a plush toy kiosk. Yet, millions of years after it died, a baby dinosaur from a muddy Korean shoreline has ended up sharing a name (and a kind of unexpected afterlife) with a cartoon.

Not bad for a kid who spent 100 million years off‑screen inside a rock.