Revealed: North America's smallest dinosaur
Hesperonychus: As large as a modern-day cat
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Tuesday, 17, Mar 2009 10:01
The smallest dinosaur-ever discovered in North America has been unveiled by palaeontologists.
A relative of the Velociraptor - popularised in the Jurassic Park canon - the new species has been named Hesperonychus.
"Hesperonychus is currently the smallest dinosaur known from North America," said Nick Longrich, palaeontology research associate at the University of Calgary.
The little carnivore, which lived about 75 million years ago in modern-day Alberta, Canada, weighed just 2kg and was just 50cm tall; about the same size as a domesticate cat.
Canadian palaeontologists, publishing their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, claim the dinosaur hunted insects, small mammals and other prey through forests and swamps in the late Cretaceous period.
Mr Longrich said the discovery "emphasises how little we actually know, and it raises the possibility that there are even smaller ones out there waiting to be found".
"Small carnivorous dinosaurs seemed to be completely absent from the environment, which seemed bizarre because today the small carnivores outnumber the big ones," he continued.
"It turns out that they were here and they played a more important role in the ecosystem than we realised. So for the past 100 years, we've completely overlooked a major part of North America's dinosaur community."
Fossilised remains of Hesperonychus were first collected in 1982 but went unstudied for a quarter of a century.
"Until now, the smallest carnivorous dinosaurs we have seen in North America have been about the size of a wolf," Mr Longrich continue. "Judging by the amount of material that was collected, we believe animals the size of Hesperonychus must have been quite common on the landscape."