Gigantic dinosaur found in China
Artist's image of the Gigantoraptor
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Thursday, 14, Jun 2007 12:03
Scientists have uncovered the remains of a gigantic, bird-like dinosaur in Inner Mongolia, China.
The new dinosaur species, named Gigantoraptor, has surprised researchers as they thought that carnivorous dinosaurs got smaller as they became more bird-like, but the remains suggest that it had a body mass index of about 1,400kg.
This weight makes it about 35 times heavier than other similarly-feathered dinosaurs, which rarely exceeded a body mass of 40kg.
Gigantoraptor moved on its two hind legs and had feathered arms with long claw talons.
Writing in the journal Nature, Xing Xu and colleagues from the Chinese Academy of Sciences describe how the creature lived in the late Cretaceous period about 70 million years ago.
They believe it would have been about 8m long and would have stood, at the shoulder, twice the height of man.
Lines of arrested development in the Chinese fossils indicate that it was still a young adult when it died, so the full-sized Gigantoraptor may have been even larger than this.
"Gigantoraptor possesses several salient features previously unknown in any other dinosaur and its hind limb bone scaling and proportions are significantly different from those of other coelurosaurs, thus increasing the morphological diversity among dinosaurs," the researchers write.