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Mexico 2023 "Prehistoric Dimensions"

U N D E R C O N S T R U C T I O N

Issue Date	28.07.2023
ID	Michel: ; Scott: Stanley Gibbons: Yvert: Category: pR
Design	Victor Slehiman, Nancy Torres Lopez
Stamps in set	3
Value	$15.00 - Coahuilaceratops magnacuerna $15.00 - Aquilolamna milarcae $15.00 - Acantholipan gonzalezi
Emission/Type	commemorative
Issue place
Size (width x height)	48 mm x 40 mm
Layout	Mini-Sheet of 3 stamps, Sheet of 24 stamps (8 strips of 3 stamps, 2 strips a row)
Products	FDC x4
Paper	Glossy white couché, rubberized 110 g/m²
Perforation	13 x 13
Print Technique	Rotogravure, multicolor
Printed by
Quantity	300.000 (100.000 strips)
Issuing Authority	Correos

prehistoric animals on stamps of Mexico 2023

On July 28^st, 2023, the Post Authority of Mexico issued the set of 3 stamps "Prehistoric Dimensions". The animals depicted on these stamps are: Coahuilaceratops, Aquilolamna, Acantholipan.

As incredible as it may seem, in each layer of fine sediments that were deposited one by one in the depths of ancient seas and coastal territories, in what today occupies the territory of the well-known Chihuahuan Desert, they contain stories from a gigantic book that keeps knowledge of the diversity of the past. They are proof of the events that occurred in these territories, which are expressed through the remains and evidence of different animals that were trapped for millions of years between these substrates. With a history spanning more than 165 million years, they came to occupy virtually every habitat available on the continents of their geological time.

Research on dinosaurs now taking place in Mexico has allowed paleontologists to better understand the environments that existed in southern North America around 70 million years ago.
The Chihuahuan Desert is currently the area with the greatest variety of dinosaur fossils within the national territory.

The Chihuahuan Desert is a desert ecoregion designation covering parts of northern Mexico and the southwestern United States. It occupies much of far West Texas, the middle to lower Rio Grande Valley and the lower Pecos Valley in New Mexico, and a portion of southeastern Arizona, as well as the central and northern portions of the Mexican Plateau.

This is due to the peculiar location of this territory 70 million years ago, time in which in this area there was a system of mouths of mighty rivers, which in turn caused the development of estuaries, lagoons and marshes. As are the states of Tabasco and Veracruz today.

The following prehistoric animals were depicted on the stamps:

Coahuilaceratops magnacuerna is a genus of omnivorous ceratopsian dinosaur.

Coahuilaceratops on stamp of Mexico 2023

The dinosaur lived during the Late Cretaceous period (late Campanian stage - 72.5 to 71.4 million years ago) in what is now southern Coahuila in northern Mexico, as can be recognized from the first portion of the generic name (Coahuilaceratops).
The second part of the name, “ceratops,” is Greek for “horned face.”
The specific name magnacuerna combines the Latin word “magna,” meaning “great,” with the Spanish “cuerna,” meaning “horn,” in reference to the very large supraorbital horncores of this taxon.

Fossils of the dinosaur were discovered in 2001 by school teacher and amateur paleontologist Claudio de Leon Davila. De Leon Davila discovered the bones while looking for fossils in the Cerro del Pueblo Formation in the Ejido Porvenir de Jalpa, General Cepeda, Coahuila.
In 2003 the team from the Utah Museum of Natural History (USA), the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology (Canada) and the Desert Museum (Mexico), uncovered fossils of two Coahuilaceratops specimens - one adult and a juvenile, as well as fish, turtle, crocodile, lizard, snake, and mosasaur, together with dinosaur eggshell and abundant trackways.
The fossils of Coahuilaceratops were prepared at the Utah Museum of Natural History, requiring two years of meticulous work by skilled volunteer preparator Jerry Golden.

The Desert Museum is a museum in Saltillo, Coahuila, that promotes an ecological culture. It was designed by the architect Francisco López Guerra and was inaugurated on 25 November 1999. It has a large collection of fossils and plants and includes autochthonous animals of the Mexican desert.
Coahuilaceratops specimens are permanently housed in the collections of the Museum of the Desert. Casts of the fossils are reposited in the collections of the Utah Museum of Natural History in Salt Lake City (USA).

The dinosaur was formally described in 2010 by the team of international scientists lead by Mark A. Loewen from the Utah Museum of Natural History (USA). It was the first horned dinosaur from Mexico and one the first dinosaurs from the country to be named. In one of his interviews Mark Loewen said: "We know very little about the dinosaurs of Mexico, and this find increases immeasurably our knowledge of the dinosaurs living in Mexico during the Late Cretaceous"

Although based on incomplete remains, Coahuilaceratops is thought to possess among the largest horns of any dinosaur currently known. The supraorbital horns are about a meter long, the biggest known so far for a ceratopsian, and a skull is estimated to have been about 1.8 m long.
Even though such horns are common features of ceratopsid dinosaurs, those of Coahuilaceratops appear to be the largest known for the group, exceeding the size of eye horns even in Triceratops. Like other horned dinosaurs, Coahuilaceratops probably used its headgear to attract mates and fight with rivals of the same species.


Skull reconstructions. Image credit: (Loewen 2010)	Life restoration of Coahuilaceratops magnacuema. Artwork by Lukas Panzarin. Image credit: dinonews.net

Coahuilaceratops, rhino-sized creature, has an approximate length of 6.7 meters and weighed between 4 and 5 tons.
Mark Loewen described the arid, desert terrain where the dinosaur was recovered as nothing like Mexico during the Late Cretaceous. About 72 million years ago, the region was a humid estuary with lush vegetation, an area where salt water from the ocean mixed with fresh water from rivers, much like the modern Gulf Coast of the southeastern United States. Many dinosaur bones in the area are covered with fossilized snails and marine clams, indicating that the dinosaurs inhabited environments adjacent to the seashore.
The rocks in which Coahuilaceratops was found also contain large fossil deposits of jumbled duck-bill dinosaur skeletons. These sites appear to represent mass death events, perhaps associated with storms such as hurricanes that occur in the region today.

U N D E R C O N S T R U C T I O N

Acantholipan is a genus of ankylosaurian dinosaur (Nodosauridae family) from Mexico from the early Santonian age of the Late Cretaceous.