'Chicken from hell' dino no match for T. rex

 Chicken coup: A reconstruction of Anzu wyliei in its 66-million-year-old environment in western North America.(Source: Mark A Klingler/Carnegie Museum of Natural History)

Will Dunham
ABC/Reuters

A giant, 200-kilogram "chicken from hell" that resembles an Australian cassowary roamed Dakota at the same time as T. rex, US scientists reveal today.

And while the "weird-looking" bird may have eaten the odd mammal, it would have been chips for this chicken if it had crossed T. Rex's path.

The revelation comes as another team of researchers has unveiled 126-million-year-old fossils, found in China, of the oldest-known stick or leaf insect.

The chicken-like dinosaur, Anzu wyliei , had a head shaped like a bird's, a toothless beak, hands with big sharp claws, long legs for fast running and was probably covered in feathers.

A bizarre crest on its head is similar to that found on the cassowary, a flightless bird native to Australia and New Guinea.

Anzu wyliei measured about 3.5 metres long, 1.5 metres at the hip and weighed about 200-300 kilograms, the researchers say.

"It has the nickname 'the chicken from hell'. And that's a pretty good description," says palaeontologist Dr Matt Lamanna of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, who led the research published in the journal PLOS One.

"If you could get in a time machine and go back to western North America at the end of the age of dinosaurs and see this thing, I would say your first reaction might be, 'What a weird-looking bird'," Lamanna says. "It would not look like most people's conception of a dinosaur."

On the menu

It is the largest North American example of a type of bird-like dinosaur well known from Asia. Its extensive remains offer a detailed picture of the North American branch of these dinosaurs that has remained mysterious since their first bones were found about a century ago, the scientists say.

Fossils of feathers are extremely rare and they were not found with any of the three partial skeletons of Anzu wyliei. But the researchers believe it had feathers based on fossils of close relatives from China that have clear evidence of them.

A. wyliei lived at the sunset of the age of dinosaurs, not long before an enormous meteorite is thought to have struck Earth about 65.5 million years ago and wiped them out along with hordes of other creatures, while sparing many birds.

It lived in a humid, low-lying environment dotted with rivers and swamps and lush with vegetation and plant-eating dinosaurs like the horned Triceratops, armoured Ankylosaurus, dome-headed Pachycephalosaurus and duck-billed Edmontosaurus.

But also hanging around the neighbourhood was one of the fiercest predators in Earth's history, Tyrannosaurus rex.

A. wyliei may have been an omnivore, munching on leaves, fruits or flowers while also swallowing the occasional mammal foolish enough to cross its path, the researchers say.

But it probably needed to be careful not to end up on someone else's menu.

"To a T. Rex, this thing would not look like a 'chicken from hell'. It would look like lunch," Lamanna says.

Ancient camouflage

Also in PLOS One today an international team of scientists has released details of its discovery in China of the fossil of an insect that lived about 126 million years ago whose appearance mimicked that of a nearby plant.

It is the oldest-known stick or leaf insect that used such natural trickery, the team says.

The insect, named Cretophasmomima melanogramma, was found in Liaoning province in northeastern China, part of the Jehol rock formation that has yielded many stunningly detailed fossils of creatures like early birds and feathered dinosaurs.

The researchers realised the insect looked remarkably like the leaf of a plant that grew in the same place at the time that was a relative of the Ginkgo tree.

The fossil shows wings with parallel dark lines that, when the bug was in the resting position, seem to produce a tongue-like shape that could hide its abdomen, they say. The plant had similar tongue-shaped leaves marked with multiple lines.

The researchers think the insect evolved to look like these leaves - even their green colour - and concealed itself from predators by mingling with the foliage. Females of this insect were estimated at about 55 millimetres long and the males a bit smaller.

"Cretophasmomima melanogramma is one of the grand-cousins of today's stick and leaf insects," says one of the researchers, Dr Olivier Bethoux of the Centre for Research on Palaeobiodiversity and Palaeoenvironments in the National Museum of Natural History in Paris.

There are roughly 3,200 known species of stick and leaf insects, which are members of the insect order known as Phasmatodea, derived from the ancient Greek word for phantom for their ability to seemingly disappear into the background.

Cretophasmomima melanogramma lived during the Cretaceous, the last of the three time periods that make up the Mesozoic Era, sometimes called the Age of Dinosaurs.

The arrival of small insect-eating birds and agile, branch-walking mammals provided good reason for insects to develop new predator-avoidance strategies like mimicking the appearance of a leaf, Bethoux says.

The researchers say this insect lacked some characteristics of similar insects seen today, such as a curved part of the front legs that hide the head.

'Chicken from Hell' skeleton sheds light on 250kg feathered dinosaur Anzu wyliei

 

A 250-kilogram 'chicken from hell' with features similar to the cassowary is the latest dinosaur discovery by US scientists, who have named the "scary and absurd" creature after a mythical bird-like demon.

Almost a full skeleton of the sharp-clawed, crested raptor that roamed the Hell Creek rock formation in North and South Dakota 66 million years ago was pieced together from three different specimens.
They have named it Anzu wyliei: "anzu" after a bird-like demon in Mesopotamian mythology, and "wyliei" after Wylie J Tuttle, the dinosaur-loving grandson of a Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh trustee.

"It was a giant raptor, but with a chicken-like head and presumably feathers. The animal stood about 10 feet tall, so it would be scary as well as absurd to encounter," says University of Utah biology postdoctoral fellow Emma Schachner, a co-author of a new study of the dinosaur.

Pieces of a strange-looking puzzle
Three partial skeletons of the dinosaur – almost making up a full skeleton – were excavated from the uppermost level of the Hell Creek rock formation in North and South Dakota, a formation known for abundant fossils of Tyrannosaurus rex and Triceratops.

At a scientific meeting in 2005, Matthew Lamanna of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Tyler Lyson of the Smithsonian in Washington and Dr Schachner realised they had fossils of the same new species of dinosaur.

They soon began collaborating on the new study and asked Hans-Dieter Sues to join them because he was an expert on this type of dinosaur.

"It took years since all of us had busy schedules, and I moved to Utah in 2010 to work on reptile respiratory evolution," says Dr Schachner.

Having a nearly complete skeleton of Anzu wyliei sheds light on a category of oviraptorosaur theropod dinosaurs named caenagnathids, which have been known for a century, but only from limited fossil evidence.

"I am really excited about this discovery because Anzu is the largest oviraptorosaur found in North America," she said.

"Oviraptorosaurs are a group of dinosaurs that are closely related to birds and often have strange, cassowary-like crests on their heads."

A dangerous life
Lead researcher Dr Lamanna says they call the creature the "chicken from hell".

And while it might look rather strange, the bones collected show that Anzu needed to be tough to survive.

Not only did it share the Hell Creek formation with the most notorious carnivore of all time, the T-rex, but Anzu seems to have been in some scrapes.

Two of the three specimens show clear evidence of injuries: one has a broken and healed rib, while the other has an arthritic toe bone that may have been caused by an avulsion fracture (where a tendon ripped a piece off the bone to which it was attached).

"These animals were clearly able to survive quite a bit of trauma, as two of the specimens show signs of semi-healed damage," says Dr Schachner.

"Whether these injuries were the result of combat between two individuals or an attack by a larger predator remains a mystery."

Much to learn
As much insight as the Anzu skeletons provide, paleontologists still have much to learn about North American oviraptorosaurs.

"We're finding that caenagnathids were an amazingly diverse bunch of dinosaurs," says Dr Lamanna.
"Whereas some were turkey-sized, others - like Anzu and Gigantoraptor - were the kind of thing you definitely wouldn't want to meet in a dark alley. Apparently these oviraptorosaurs occupied a much wider range of body sizes and ecologies than we previously thought.

"After nearly a century of searching, we palaeontologists finally have the fossils to show what these creatures looked like from virtually head to toe. And in almost every way, they're even weirder than we imagined."

By Cristen Tilley

Bizarre bat-winged dinosaur once soared over China

Artist's impression of the new dinosaur Yi qi. (Dinostar Co. Ltd)

Jennifer Viegas
Discovery News

A dinosaur with bat-like wings once soared through the skies of what is now China.

 

The Jurassic dinosaur, named Yi qi, has the shortest name ever given to a dinosaur. Yi qi, pronounced "ee chee," means "strange wing."

Yi qi also appears to be the earliest known flying non-avian dinosaur. At 160 million years old, it is older than the first known birds, such as Archaeopteryx.

"This is the most unexpected discovery I have ever made, even though I have found a few really bizarre dinosaurs in my career," says palaeontologist Xu Xing of the Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Palaeoanthropology (IVPP) in Beijing.

"I know the complexity of the dino-bird transition, but this new find still shocks me," adds Xu, who is the lead author of the study, published in the journal Nature.

"It demonstrates how extreme the experimentation for dinosaurs to get in air is."

He and his colleagues unearthed the remains for Yi qi at Hebei Province in China.

At first, the scientists puzzled over rod-like bones that extended from each wrist of the tiny dinosaur that weighed about the same as a modern pigeon. Colleagues joked that the dino used the bones as ski poles or giant chopsticks.

Co-author Corwin Sullivan, a Canadian palaeontologist now based at the IVPP, determined their real purpose after he pored over scientific literature on flying and gliding animals for a different project.
"I came across a paragraph in a textbook that said flying squirrels have a strut of cartilage attached to either the wrist or elbow to help support the flight membrane. I immediately thought, wait a minute, that sounds familiar!" says Sullivan.

Further investigation of Yi qi's remains uncovered patches of membranous tissue that covered its wings.

While the dinosaur did have feathers, they were more like hairs, bristles or streamers, and would not have been capable of forming good aerodynamic surfaces, Sullivan says.

Given the dinosaur's bat-like wings, "Yi qi was mainly gliding, perhaps in combination with a bit of awkward flapping," he adds.

The researchers believe Yi qi was a scansoriopterygid - a group of dinosaurs only known from China that were closely related to primitive birds, such as the Archaeopteryx.

Although the dinosaur shared traits with bats, it wasn't related to them, since bats are mammals. It therefore represents a striking example of convergent evolution.

Other unusual characteristics

Yi qi had other noteworthy characteristics, aside from its unusual wings.

Sullivan says that its arms were proportionally very long, with each arm ending in a hand that had three clawed fingers. One of the fingers was very elongated, with it and the other fingers helping to support the flight membrane.

Its head was small, but equipped with tiny peg-like teeth, which it probably used to eat prey such as insects, small mammals and lizards.

As for what might have eaten Yi qi, Xu said, "I would not be surprised to see some primitive tyrannosaurs around."

While some studies theorise that scansoriopterygids evolved to become birds, Xu and his team think otherwise. They instead place dromaeosaurids and troodontids closer to birds.

"Yi qi seems to have been part of a Jurassic radiation of small dinosaurs that were experimenting with different ways of becoming airborne," Sullivan says.

"All these dinosaurs were closely related to birds and, in fact, it's best to think of birds as just one group that emerged during that evolutionary radiation - a group that happened to be extremely long-lived and successful."

This story was originally published on Discovery News

Meet T.rex's 'bizarre' vegetarian cousin

Chilesaurus diegosuarezi represents a new type of theropod (Gabriel Lio)

Tyrannosaurus rex had an odd-looking vegetarian cousin with a tiny head, long neck and stubby fingers, say scientists.
 
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.

The dinosaur -- nicknamed 'The Platypus -- is described today in the journal Nature .

"Chilesaurus constitutes one of the most bizarre dinosaurs ever found," says study co-author Fernando Novas of Argentina's Natural History Museum in Buenos Aires.

"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."

The bizarre dinosaur was named after the South American country where its fossilised remains were found, and the seven-year old boy, Diego Suarez, 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 short necks, big heads and strong, muscled hind legs much bigger than their arms, vicious claws and jaws brimming with razor-sharp teeth.

But Chilesaurus cuts an altogether less threatening figure.

'Jigsaw puzzle' dinosaur

"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," says Novas.
"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 three metres 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.

"We are puzzled by the weird anatomy of Chilesaurus, which recalls different dinosaurian groups," says Novas.

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.

Yet the research team believe Chilesaurus represents a new type of theropod -- "an evolutionary jigsaw puzzle that will generate debate among palaeontologists," says Novas.

Until now, herbivorous theropods were known only in close dinosaur relatives of modern-day birds, but the discovery of Chilesaurus shows that a meat-free diet was acquired much earlier than thought, say the scientists.

Chilesaurus lived at the end of the Jurassic period, some 145 million years ago -- long before T.rex which ruled the plate at the end of the Cretaceous era some 70-65 million years ago.

Related: Stegosaurus plate shape may reveal gender
Related: Brontosaurus thunders back after a century in exile

Tyrannosaurs were violent cannibals

Artists reconstruction of one Daspletosaurus feeding on another. (Tuomas Koivurinne )

Remains of a mutilated dinosaur victim provide strong evidence for what has long been suspected - Tyrannosaurus rex and his kin were violent animals that also practiced cannibalism.
 
The remains, described in the latest issue of the journal PeerJ, are of the large carnivorous tyrannosaur Daspletosaurus, which suffered numerous injuries during its lifetime and was partially eaten after it died.

Palaeontologists believe that members of Daspletosaurus' own species inflicted all of the damage.

"This animal clearly had a tough life suffering numerous injuries across the head including some that must have been quite nasty," says lead author David Hone from Queen Mary University of London.

"The most likely candidate to have done this is another member of the same species, suggesting some serious fights between these animals during their lives," he adds.

Daspletosaurus lived around 77 million years ago in North America. The victim studied by the researchers hailed from what is now Alberta, Canada. It was an older teenager when it bit the dust, so it hadn't grown to full size yet. Still, this was a large animal. At death it measured about 6 metres long and weighed approximately 500 kilograms.

Analysis of this dinosaur's skull uncovered numerous injuries that had previously healed.

Although not all of the injuries can be attributed to bites, several are close in shape to the teeth of tyrannosaurs, Hone says. One bite to the back of the head had broken off part of the skull and left a circular tooth-shaped puncture though the bone.

According to the researchers, the fact that alterations to the bone's surface indicate healing means that the injuries were not fatal and the animal lived for some time after they were inflicted.

The poor dinosaur's life took a turn for the worse later, though. The preservation of the skull and other bones, as well as damage to the jaw bones show that the dinosaur died young and began to decay.

Shortly thereafter, a large tyrannosaur — probably from the same species — chomped into the dead teen dinosaur and presumably ate at least part of it.

The remains are unique in that they provide evidence for both combat between dinosaurs of the same species and cannibalism.

T. rex was closely related to Daspletosaurus. They essentially were cousins and grew to nearly the same sizes as adults. It's therefore likely that T. rex and other large carnivorous tyrannosaurs engaged in similar behaviour.

This article originally appeared on DiscoveryNews.com

Brontosaurus thunders back after a century in exile

Brontosaurus (foreground) and Diplodocus depicted by Charles R Knight in 1897 (Wikimedia commons)

Bianca Nogrady
ABC

More than 100 years after it was banished from existence, Brontosaurus can be reinstated as a dinosaur genus, according to a detailed study of the iconic dinosaur's family tree.
 
Palaeontologists from the UK and Portugal conducted a comprehensive anatomical survey of 81 specimens of the Diplodocidae superfamily of large long-necked dinosaurs, which includes Diplodocus, Apatosaurus, and once again, Brontosaurus.

Published today in the journal PeerJ , the researchers argue that their analysis overturns a century-old decision to classify the dinosaur as an Apatosaurus rather than a genus of its own.

'Brontosaurus' is not only one of the most charismatic dinosaurs, but one of the most controversial.
The headless skeletons of two large long-necked dinosaurs were discovered in 1870 and described by US palaeontologist Othniel Charles Marsh. The first was named Apatosaurus ajax -- the deceptive lizard, the second was named Brontosaurus excelsus -- the thunder lizard.

Marsh wrongly reconstructed the skeleton of Brontosaurus excelsus using the head of another long-necked dinosaur, Camarasaurus.

Shortly after Marsh died, palaeontologists discovered another skeleton that was similar to both Apatosaurus ajax and Brontosaurus excelsus. They decided that Brontosaurus was not anatomically distinct enough from Apatosaurus to warrant its own genus, so it became Apatosaurus excelsus.

"What palaeontologists of the time had done was they'd compared the anatomy of the bones and made a subjective decision that these things were relatively similar and might as well be the same," says co-author Associate Professor Roger Benson, a palaeontologist at the University of Oxford.

"In 1903 that decision was made, but Brontosaurus is incredibly iconic and somehow it refused to die in the public imagination, even though scientists thought that it was not a distinct thing."

The final blow to Brontosaurus happened in the 1970s, when researchers showed that Apatosaurus was not closely related to Camarasaurus, but to yet another dinosaur from the same area: Diplodocus.
Recently many more specimens have been discovered, allowing for a more comprehensive comparison across specimens by Benson and colleagues, who have reconstructed the entire branch of the Diplodcidae family tree.

"If we've got lots of specimens and we've got detailed quantitative info about their anatomy, then for every comparison between two specimens, we can come up with a number that's the difference between them," Benson says.

Lead author Dr Emmanuel Tschopp says there were a number of anatomical features that distinguished Brontosaurus from Apatosaurus.

"Even though both are very massive and robust animals, Apatosaurus has a more wide neck than Brontosaurus has, so I think that's the most visual and obvious thing to distinguish the two," says Tschopp, a post-doctoral research at the University of Nova Lisbon.

Family tree

While the return of Brontosaurus will no doubt capture the public imagination, the greater worth of the study is its detailed redrawing of the Diplodocidae family tree, says palaeontologist Dr Steven Salisbury of the University of Queensland.

"People might wonder why that hasn't happened until now, but sauropods [large, four-legged plant-eating dinosaurs] are notoriously difficult to work on because they're so big and awkward to look at," says Salisbury, who was not involved in the research.

Adding to the confusion, many of the sauropod specimens were discovered in the late 19th century, and some were incorrectly reconstructed and mounted, Salisbury says.

There was also an initial rush to name specimens during this period known as the 'Bone Wars', some of which were later challenged as more bones were discovered.

"It highlights how science and particularly taxonomy works," Salisbury says.

"Names are proposed for specimens -- and those names may come and go depending on what people think of a species or genus or a taxon -- but importantly, if you've got specimens to look at all the time you can test those ideas, so names are really just tests of ideas relating to taxonomy."

In addition to reinstating Brontosaurus, the team also discovered a new genus, which they called Galeamopus, that had previously been considered to be just another species of Diplodocus.

At the same time, they concluded that another genus -- Dinheirosaurus -- was not distinct enough from the Suprasaurus genus to warrant its own and was therefore subsumed back into Suprasaurus as a species only.

Glaurung

Glaurung fighting with dwarves by Justin Gerard

Glaurung by Markus Erdt

Glaurung was the first terrestrial, fire-breathing Dragon in Middle-earth. First of the Fire-drakes was Glaurung, the Father of Dragons. 

After only a century of brooding and growing in the dark pits of Angband, Glaurung first emerged in FA 260 in a fiery wrath, burst from the gates and startled the races of Middle-earth. Though Glaurung was not of the winged race that would later arise, he was the greatest terror of his time. He burned and ravaged Ard-galen, the land of the Elves in Hithlum and Dorthonion. However, he was not yet at his full strength, so was driven back by Fingon, the prince of Hithlum at that time, and his archers. Morgoth was displeased with Glaurung for revealing himself before he had grown to full strength, as Morgoth had planned to allow the Dragon to grow to full power before unleashing him.

To Glaurung, this attack was but an adolescent adventure, a youthful testing of strength. Terrible as he was to the Elves, his strength was barely developed, his scale armor still vulnerable to the attack of weapons; this was just a taste of his power. 

Glaurung was contained in Angband for another two centuries before he was again loosed. This was the beginning of the Fourth Battle of the Battles of Beleriand. It became known as the Dagor Bragollach when Glaurung in full power led Melkor's forces against the High Elves of Beleriand. His vast bulk and scorching fire cleared a path into the enemy armies, and with the Balrogs at his side, Glaurung led the Orcs to an astounding victory and broke the siege of Angband.

In the fifth battle, the Nirnaeth Arnoediad, Glaurung caused even more destruction, as he had fathered a brood of lesser Dragons to follow him into battle. So a great army of Elves and Men fell before the onslaught, for none could withstand the Dragonfire save the Dwarves of Belegost, who had come to battle a common foe.

Morgoth used Glaurung as well to hold the territories he gained; but force in battle was not the only power the monster knew. He brought many under his sway with the binding power of his serpent eye and hypnotic Dragon Spell. 

After Glaurung aided Morgoth during the Battle of Unnumbered Tears, he was given the assignment to complete the Sack of Nargothrond, one of the Elven fortresses in Beleriand. Glaurung came upon Nargothrond with great force, and sacked the kingdom easily. He faced Túrin, son of Húrin, at the gate and so he froze Túrin with his eyes. Túrin heard the screams of Finduilas, daughter of Orodreth, as he stood there. When the captives had been taken away, Glaurung unfroze Túrin and gave him two choices: the first to follow Finduilas, and the second to aid his mother and sister, who were suffering in Dor-lómin. Túrin chose the latter, and in this way he was deceived by the dragon, for his mother and sister were living well in Doriath. Glaurung then gathered up all the treasures of Felagund and hoarded them deep within Nargothrond's underground halls, he then sat atop his hoard, guarding it jealously, and so he rested.

Glaurung received knowledge of Morwen and Nienor's departure to seek their family members. In the forest where they were travelling, Glaurung found Nienor and caused her to lose her mind. This caused her to run through the forest "like a deer". Soon after this, Túrin found her crying on Finduilas's grave. Not knowing that she was his sister, Túrin named her Níniel (Tear maiden) and took her to his home with the folk of Brandir. There they lived for the next three years. 

After those years, Glaurung attacked the area around their home. Túrin resolved to kill the dragon. Two men went with him. One became afraid and fled, and the other was crushed by rocks. However, Túrin was able to kill Glaurung by thrusting his sword, Gurthang, into Glaurung's belly. Glaurung felt his death wound and screamed. When the dragon's blood touched Túrin, he fell into a swoon. Glaurung screamed until his strength was gone. Nienor found him there, with Túrin beside him. With his last breath, Glaurung gave Nienor her memory back, and died. Shortly thereafter, Nienor jumped into the river below, and Túrin awoke and threw himself on his sword.