Tyrannosaurus rex, one of history’s most dreaded carnivores, had an odd-looking vegetarian cousin with a tiny head, long neck and stubby fingers, scientists said on Monday, admitting that its anatomy had them puzzled.
Chilesaurus diegosuarezi had a bird-like beak with leaf-shaped teeth, evidence that it feasted on plants, but with hind-leg features similar to theropod dinosaurs, the group into which it was slotted with notorious killers like T Rex, Velociraptor and the horned Carnotaurus.
“Chilesaurus constitutes one of the most bizarre dinosaurs ever found,” Fernando Novas of Argentina’s Natural History Museum in Buenos Aires said of a study that he co-authored and is published in the journal Nature.
Photo: AFP
“At the beginning, I was convinced that we had collected three different dinosaurs, but when the most complete skeleton was prepared, it [became] evident that all the elements pertained to a single dinosaur species,” he said.
The bizarre creature was named after the South American country where its fossilized remains were found and Diego Suarez, the seven-year-old boy who discovered the first bones in 2004 while exploring the Andes Mountains with his geologist parents.
About a dozen Chilesaurus specimens have since been dug up.
Theropods like T rex tended to have relatively big heads on short necks, strong, muscled hind legs much bigger than their arms, vicious claws and jaws brimming with razor-sharp teeth.
Chilesaurus cuts an altogether less threatening figure.
“The proportionally small skull of Chilesaurus, with the presence of a horn beak at the tip of the snout and... leaf-shaped teeth, reveal that Chilesaurus was a strict plant eater,” Novas said by e-mail. “Its forearms were robust, but the hands were provided with just two blunt fingers.”
Most skeletons discovered so far were the size of a turkey, but isolated bones have revealed that Chilesaurus could grow to about 3m in length.
Novas and his team have taken to comparing Chilesaurus to a platypus, which, with its duck-like bill, beaver-like tail and otter-like feet, has features of many different animals.
Its pelvis is reminiscent of ornithischian dinosaurs with beaks, like Stegosaurus, and its wide, four-toed hind feet are similar to those of the massive “lizard-footed” sauropods, like Brontosaurus.
Until now, herbivorous theropods were known only in close dinosaur relatives of modern-day birds, the team said. Yet the discovery of Chilesaurus showed that a meat-free diet was acquired much earlier than thought.
Chilesaurus lived at the end of the Jurassic period, about 145 million years ago.
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