New dinosaur fossil unearthed
The fossil of a stocky new dinosaur with two sets of claws on its
feet unearthed in Romania has given researchers a window into what
European predators looked like in the final years of the Age of
Dinosaurs.
“We’ve all been waiting for something like this,” said study author
Mark Norell, chair of the Division of Paleontology at the American
Museum of Natural History.
“Balaur bondoc is heavy, with unexpectedly stocky limbs and fused
bones. It shows just how unusual the fauna of the area was during the
waning years of the dinosaur era.”
Balaur bondoc — which means “stocky dragon” — is related to the
Velociraptor but has 20 unique characteristics.
It was relatively small — about 1.8 to 2.1 meters long including its
tail, with a body about the size of an oversized turkey — and walked on
powerful hind legs. Enormous muscles attachment areas in the pelvis
indicated it was adapted for strength over speed.
Its hand was atrophied and some of the bones were atrophied, which
would have made grasping difficult and indicates that the lower limbs
were used to grasp and disembowel prey.
“Balaur is a new breed of predatory dinosaur,” said co-author Stephen
Brusatte, a graduate student at Columbia University. “Its anatomy shows
that it probably hunted in a different way than its less stocky
relatives,” he said in a statement.
“Compared to Velociraptor, Balaur was probably more of a kickboxer
than a sprinter, and it might have been able to take down larger animals
than itself, as many carnivores do today.”
It prowled Romania during the Late Cretaceous period — about 90 to 65
million years ago — when warm temperatures and high sea levels
fragmented Europe into small islands.
Herbivores unearthed from the period were also dwarfed — like
sauropods the size of cows and tiny duck-billed dinosaurs — but Balaur
bondoc is the first reasonably complete skeleton of a carnivorous
dinosaur discovered which was dated to that time.
“Balaur might be one of the largest predators in this ecosystem
because not even a big tooth has been found in Romania after over a
hundred years of research,” said co-author Zoltán Csiki of the
University of Bucharest.
Fragments of Balaur had been discovered more than a decade ago, but
its body was “so weird we didn’t have any idea where to fit them,” he
added.
“As European dinosaur faunas were known to be peculiar, we
half-expected to find peculiar predators as well,” Csiki said. “But, as
the first good record of these, Balaur surely exceeds our most daring
expectations.”
AFP |