23 October 2014

A dinosaur with giant arms


The BBC has an article by Rebecca Morelle about a mysterious dinosaur:
In the 1960s, researchers unearthed two gigantic dinosaur arms. For decades, scientists have speculated about what kind of beast they belonged to. Now the rest of the dinosaur's body has been unearthed, and researchers say that the creature is even more bizarre than they had thought. They say it was huge, with a beak, a humped back and giant, hoofed feet.
Lead researcher Yuong-Nam Lee, from South Korea's Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources (Kigam), said: "It turned out to be one of the weirdest dinosaurs, it's weird beyond our imagination."
For half a century, all that was known about this dinosaur was that it had enormous forearms, measuring eight feet long and tipped with three giant claws. Its name, Deinocheirus mirificus, means unusual, horrible hands. In various reconstructions, it has been imagined as anything from a Tyrannosarus Rex-type predator grasping at prey with its claws, to a giant, sloth-like climber, using its arms to dangle from trees.
But the discovery of two nearly complete skeletons in Mongolia have finally laid this speculation to rest.
The international research team says the beast was very large, measuring about eleven meters long and weighing six tons. It had an elongated head with a duck-like beak, and a large humped sail on its back. Its legs were short and stumpy, but its feet were very large, with hooves, which would have prevented it from sinking into the boggy wetlands where it lived.
The researchers think that the beast was probably a very slow mover. The contents of its stomach suggest that it ate plants and fish.
Dr. Yuong-Nam Lee said: "We did not know their function before, but the long forearms with giant claws may have been used for digging and gathering herbaceous plants in freshwater habitats."
Commenting on the research, Professor John Hutchinson, a palaeontologist from the UK's Royal Veterinary College, said: "Many dinosaur fans have seen pictures of the long arms and hands, and they really are amazing and wonderful. People were really wondering what the rest of this animal looked like. Now we know, and it's just so freaking weird; we never would have expected this animal to look so bizarre. It really is shocking to see how many weird features it has. It changes our view of what kind of forms dinosaurs can even take."
Rico says maybe these guys got ahold of it:

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