Huge bird dino unearthed in China

[Sash]

The fossilised remains of a giant bird-like dinosaur have been uncovered in the region of Inner Mongolia, China.

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.

The authors suggest the dinosaur's enormous size was due to a fast growth rate, faster even than the precocious Tyrannosaurus rex.

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.

Chinese researchers uncovered the fossilised remains of the flightless giant in the Erlian basin in Inner Mongolia.

The researchers had originally thought they had found the bones of a tyrannosaur - the group of dinosaurs to which T. rex belongs - due to their large size.

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.

"They show that it had a very fast growth rate so it probably got big by growing very rapidly, rather than growing for a very long period of time."

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.

picture - artists impression

[Tagred]

it has always disturbed me that palaeontoligists sometimes think they have got the full answer, e.g., with mammals being tiny shrew like animals during dino times. We are in the midst of another era of rich discovery of fossils, and its re-writing what we know about evolution and diversity of life, which is cool. Many good palaeontologists know that the meteor 65Ma didnt kill off all dino's but merely helped them along as they were dying out anyway, but it is accepted as the standard full stop point, which is ok, but still slightly misleading.

I once read one professors worked estimating that about 1% of animals that die can turn into fossils and that 1% of those could be found, which means there is a hell of a lot out there that will never be found, so we wont know the true diversity of life for the past 3.7Ga. I mean, look at the study of the deep sea, there are organisms being discovered by the bucket load on a daily basis where once it was thought to be a barren waste land

[Sean]

I love things like that, i've been fascinated by dinosaurs from a very early age - used to collect these magazines, got about 170 issues of it, each one would cover a different dinosaur in depth and have little snippets of information about the others, each issue would also have a piece of dinosaur you could then assemble - like a skeleton thing.

it was well ace.

i really would love to volunteer for a year or so to do that sort of thing, even if it was just digging and hauling **** for the real palaeontologists.

[Tagred]

Originally Posted by Sean

I love things like that, i've been fascinated by dinosaurs from a very early age - used to collect these magazines, got about 170 issues of it, each one would cover a different dinosaur in depth and have little snippets of information about the others, each issue would also have a piece of dinosaur you could then assemble - like a skeleton thing.

it was well ace.

i really would love to volunteer for a year or so to do that sort of thing, even if it was just digging and hauling **** for the real palaeontologists.

Well I was lucky to do some of that during my geology degree. went to an island in Scotland for 5 weeks mapping, and had to use fossils as benchmarks for timing, i brought a few home, sadly most are missing now, but it was great to get the history of a place just from observing the rock formations and using fossils to date them.