Posted on 06/14/2007 8:42:31 PM PDT by Sleeping Beauty
While some have theorised that meat-eating dinosaurs got smaller as they evolved to be more bird-like, this beast weighed about 1,400kg (3,080lbs).
That is about 35 times heavier than other similar feathered dinosaurs.
Nature journal reports that the beaked animal was 8m (26ft) long and twice as tall as a man at the shoulder; yet it was only a young adult when it died.
In truth, though, just what it ate is really mystery. Gigantoraptor erlianensis had some features associated with meat-eating dinosaurs, such as sharp claws for tearing flesh; but it also had some features associated with plant-eaters, such as a small head and long neck.
The team has established that the creature lived about 70 million years ago, in the late Cretaceous Period.
According to lines of arrested growth detected on its bones, it died in its 11th year of life.
"It was a very surprising discovery, not at all what we expected," said Xu Ling, a palaeontologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and co-author on the Nature paper.
"We think it's the largest feathered animal ever to have been discovered."
"It belongs to a very unusual group of theropod dinosaurs, which are normally meat-eaters. But this one doesn't have any teeth, so what it ate is a mystery," commented Dr Paul Barrett, a dinosaur researcher from the Natural History Museum in London, UK.
Dr Barrett added that the animal was not on the direct evolutionary line leading to today's birds. This supported the notion, he said, that the features we associate with modern birds probably arose more than once in their close relatives.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.bbc.co.uk ...
Big bad bird bump.
Heck yeah I’d run too! Run ya lil’ varmints, or you’re gonna be tender vittles for Big Bird!!
YEC INTREP
Any pics of the fossil out yet?
That’s cool.
How did Madeliena Albrighto get there????
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