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Giant, birdlike dinosaur found in Inner Mongolia

Visitors look at fossilized bones and a miniature model of a gigantic theropod dinosaur, Gigantoraptor erlianensis, which were put on display for the media in Beijing on Wednesday. The animal, which lived about 70 million years ago, is thought to have had a body mass of about 1,400kg. PHOTO: AFP

The remains of a giant, birdlike dinosaur as tall as the formidable tyrannosaur have been found in China, a surprising discovery that indicates a more complicated evolutionary process for birds than originally thought, scientists said.

Fossilized bones uncovered in the Erlian Basin of Inner Mongolia show that the specimen was about 8m in length, 5m tall and weighed 1,400kg, Xu Xing (徐星), a paleontologist at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, said on Wednesday.

The height is comparable to the meat-eating tyrannosaurs, but the dinosaur, called Gigantoraptor erlianensis, also had a beak and slender legs and likely had feathers, making it 35 times larger than its likely close relation, the Caudiperyx, a small, feathered dinosaur species, Xu said.

That puts the Gigantoraptor's existence at odds with prevailing theories that dinosaurs became smaller as they evolved into birds and that bigger dinosaurs had less birdlike characteristics, said Xu, who co-authored a paper on the finding published yesterday in the journal Nature.

"It is very important information for us in our efforts to trace the evolution process of dinosaurs to birds. It's more complicated than we imagined," Xu said.

It has not been determined if the Gigantoraptor was a herbivore, which have small heads and long necks, or a carnivore, which have sharp claws. The dinosaur has both, Xu said.

Xu and his team, which discovered three other specimens in the fossil-rich Erlian Basin, were being interviewed by Japanese media in 2005 when they discovered the Gigantoraptor remains.
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