Researchers have discovered a new species of giant, bird-like dinosaur that made nests larger than monster truck tires in what is now central China, a study said.
Measuring about 8m long and weighing up to 3,000kg, the Beibeilong sinensis — “Chinese baby dragon” — lived about 90 million years ago and is only the second known species of the giant oviraptorosaur in the world.
Darla Zelenitsky, a Canadian paleontologist who coauthored the study, said that the Beibeilong sinensis would have looked like an “overgrown cassowary,” a flightless bird resembling an emu.
Photo: AFP / University of Calgary / Darla Zelenitsky
Likely covered in feathers, oviraptorosaurs had robust, toothless beaks and often sported a crest on the top of their heads.
“It has been a big mystery for many years as to which species laid the largest-known dinosaur eggs,” Zelenitsky said. “The identification of the baby skeleton in this study revealed that these eggs were laid by giant oviraptorosaurs, a group of dinosaurs that are very poorly known from fossil bones.”
The discovery, detailed in the Nature Communications journal on Tuesday, was made using a dinosaur skeleton and egg fossil known as “Baby Louie.”
Baby Louie was among the thousands of dinosaur eggs excavated and collected from Cretaceous rocks by local farmers in Henan Province in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The specimen was then illegally sold and smuggled into the US, where it was featured in National Geographic magazine and publicly exhibited at the Indianapolis Children’s Museum.
Though the museum always intended to repatriate the Chinese fossil, the study noted, an agreement for its return was not reached until 2013, when Baby Louie found its final resting place at the Henan Geological Museum.
Because of legal concerns, only after Baby Louie had returned home was a team of Chinese and Canadian scientists able to start researching the specimen, which consisted of the bones of an embryo that died while hatching and 45cm long eggs found in a ring-shaped clutch.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
STOPOVERS: As organized crime groups in Asia and the Americas move drugs via places such as Tonga, methamphetamine use has reached levels called ‘epidemic’ A surge of drugs is engulfing the South Pacific as cartels and triads use far-flung island nations to channel narcotics across the globe, top police and UN officials told reporters. Pacific island nations such as Fiji and Tonga sit at the crossroads of largely unpatrolled ocean trafficking routes used to shift cocaine from Latin America, and methamphetamine and opioids from Asia. This illicit cargo is increasingly spilling over into local hands, feeding drug addiction in communities where serious crime had been rare. “We’re a victim of our geographical location. An ideal transit point for vessels crossing the Pacific,” Tonga Police Commissioner Shane McLennan
RUSSIAN INPUT: Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov called Washington’s actions in Asia ‘destructive,’ accusing it of being the reason for the ‘militarization’ of Japan The US is concerned about China’s “increasingly dangerous and unlawful” activities in the disputed South China Sea, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told ASEAN leaders yesterday during an annual summit, and pledged that Washington would continue to uphold freedom of navigation in the region. The 10-member ASEAN meeting with Blinken followed a series of confrontations at sea between China and ASEAN members Philippines and Vietnam. “We are very concerned about China’s increasingly dangerous and unlawful activities in the South China Sea which have injured people, harm vessels from ASEAN nations and contradict commitments to peaceful resolutions of disputes,” said Blinken, who
RSS