Nearly 50 years ago, scientists found bones of two large, powerful dinosaur arms in Mongolia and figured they had discovered a fearsome creature with killer claws.
Now scientists have found the rest of the dinosaur and have new descriptions for it: goofy and weird.
The beast probably lumbered along on two legs like a cross between TV dinosaur Barney and Jar Jar Binks of Star Wars fame. It was 5-metres tall and 11-metres long, weighing seven tonnes, with a duckbill on its head and a humplike sail on its back.
Throw in those killer claws, tufts of feathers here and there, and no teeth — and try not to laugh.
And if that’s not enough, it ate like a giant vacuum cleaner.
That’s Deinocheirus mirificus, which means “terrible hands that look peculiar”.
Scientists are drawing a new sketch of the animal after a full skeleton was found in Mongolia and described in a paper released on Wednesday by the journal Nature.
Some 70 million years old, it’s an ancestral relative of the modern ostrich and belongs to the dinosaur family often called ostrich dinosaurs.
“Deinocheirus turned out to be one the weirdest dinosaurs beyond our imagination,” study lead author Yuong-Nam Lee, director of the Geological Museum in Daejeon, South Korea, said.
When scientists in 1965 found the first forearm bones — nearly 2.5-metres long — many of them envisioned “a creature that would strike terror in people”, said University of Maryland dinosaur expert Thomas Holtz Jr, who was not part of the study. “Now it’s a creature that would strike bemusement, amazement.”
And yes, he said, “it’s pretty goofy.”
The find is tremendous but is a cautionary tale about jumping to conclusions without enough evidence, said University of Chicago dinosaur expert Paul Sereno, who was not part of the discovery.
It also reminds us that evolution isn’t always what we think, Sereno said.
“This is evolution in a dinosaur — not a mammal — world,” Mr Sereno said. “The starting point is a two-legged animal looking somewhat like a fuzzy-feathered ostrich. Now you want to get really big and suck up lots of soft vegetation. In the end you look like a goofy Michelin ostrich with fuzz and a tail — not a cow.”
* Associated Press
