Bird-like dinosaur species identified
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RESEARCHERS have discovered a new species of giant, bird-like dinosaur that made nests larger than monster truck tires in central China.
Measuring almost 8 meters long and weighing up to 3,000 kilograms, the Beibeilong sinensis — baby dragon from China — lived about 90 million years ago and is only the second known species of the giant oviraptorosaur in the world.
Darla Zelenitsky, a Canadian paleontologist who co-authored the study, said the Beibeilong would have looked like an “overgrown cassowary,” a flightless bird resembling an emu. The oviraptorosaurs had a toothless beak and often sported a crest on the top of its head.
“It has been a big mystery for many years as to which species laid the largest-known dinosaur eggs,” Zelenitsky said.
“The identification of the baby skeleton in this study revealed that these eggs were laid by giant oviraptorosaurs, a group of dinosaurs that are very poorly known from fossil bones.”
The discovery was made using a dinosaur skeleton and egg fossil known as “Baby Louie,” said the journal, Nature Communications Tuesday.
Baby Louie was among the thousands of dinosaur eggs excavated from Cretaceous rocks in central Henan Province in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The specimen was illegally sold and smuggled into the United States, where it featured in National Geographic magazine and exhibited at the Indianapolis Children’s Museum.
The museum always intended to repatriate the Chinese fossil, but Baby Louie did not find its final resting place at the Henan Geological Museum in central China until 2013.
Because of legal concerns, only after Baby Louie had returned home was a team of Chinese and Canadian scientists able to research the specimen, which included the bones of an embryo that died while hatching and 45-centimeter-long eggs found in a ring-shaped clutch.
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