Has an unbelievably weird mixture of anatomical features.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: A pair of Chilean geologists who moonlight as fossil hunters have excavated the fossilized remains of a bizarre Jurassic dinosaur that seems to combine the traits of a menagerie of different prehistoric animals.
According to The Guardian, the discovery ranks as one of the most remarkable dinosaur finds of the past 20 years.
The evolutionary hodgepodge of a dinosaur grew to the size of a small horse and was the most abundant animal to be found 145 million years ago in what is now the Aysén region of Patagonia.
The first fossilized bones of the creature were discovered in 2004 when the Chilean couple were studying rocks in the Andes to understand how the mountain range formed. The couple’s son, Diego, was playing nearby when he uncovered a fossilized bone that turned out to belong to the new species.
Named Chilesaurus diegosuarezi after 7-year-old Diego, the beast belongs to the theropod group of dinosaurs, which includes the carnivorous tyrannosaurs and velociraptors, reported The Guardian. But unlike its carnivorous cousins, Chilesaurus uniquely developed its diet to become a vegetarian.
“It has an unbelievably weird mixture of anatomical features,” Paul Barrett, a dinosaur researcher at the Natural History Museum in London said of Chilesaurus. “If you found isolated bones from this one animal in different places you’d probably conclude that the bones came from completely different dinosaur groups, rather than representing one unusual species,” he continued.
“This is a really unusual beastie, a bit of a dinosaur Frankenstein,” paleontologist Lindsay Zanno of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences told The Smithsonian. “If Chilesaurus’ proposed place in the theropod family tree holds up to additional scrutiny, then we have at least three and up to seven instances of theropods adapting to some form of a plant-based diet, one of which may be linked to the origin of the only surviving group of theropod dinosaurs, birds.”