Monday, June 18, 2007

A huge flightless bird/dinosaur fossil has been unearthed in China. From the USA Today story by Calum MacLeod:

BEIJING — The dinosaur world's latest star had a toothless beak, waved feathered arms incapable of flight and may have hunted only plants. But if you met Gigantoraptor erlianensis in a Mongolian forest 70 million years ago, best to have given it a wide berth. At more than 16 feet tall and roughly 3,000 pounds, the beast could stand eyeball-to-eyeball with a tyrannosaur, Chinese researchers say.

According to the paper in Nature, this find remarkably resembles other finds where feathers are present, hence the designation. It is awfully big to have feathers, though.

No comments:

Post a Comment