PHILADELPHIA: A new species of dinosaurs have been identified by researchers, who believe the 125-million-year-old fossils they found near Utah could well be the missing link they have been searching for between the meat-eating variety and a later herbivorous generation.
The fossils they worked on are those of of two-legged carnivorous dinosaurs called maniraptorans, from which birds are believed to have evolved. These fossils had leaf-shaped teeth, stubby legs and bellies typical of plant-eaters, a report in the recent issue of the journal Nature, said.
The researchers have named the news species as falcarius utahensis.
"Falcarius is literally a missing link, it's a kind of half-raptor and half-herbivore, with such a transition triggered by a shift in diet," Scott Sampson, the chief curator at the Utah Museum of Natural History, said. "It appeared on Earth at around the time that tasty, nutritious, flowering plants appeared."
Research on the fossils has revealed that falcarius walked on two legs,was about four metres long and 1.4 metres tall, and had strong forearms and sharp, curved claws. It also had feathers and could well be the earliest North American example of a therizinosaur, a specie earlier located in China.
Lindsay Zanno, a graduate student in geology and geophysics, describes falcarius as, "a cross between an ostrich, a gorilla and Edward Scissorhands".
Utah's palaeontologist James Kirkland says that the new animal shows a shorter meat-cutting teeth, larger abdomen and an early-stage changed legs that could carry their weight. All these are beginning-stage features associated with plant-eating dinosaurs.
Kirkland assumes that the animals had lived in flocks or herds, were attracted to plants around springs, and were occasionally mass-poisoned.
The Utah excavation had begun three years ago, when a man who sold fossils on the sly approached Kirkland and said he had found bones that might come from a new species. He showed the site but was put in jail for five months. The researchers today have nearly 90 per cent of the falcarius's bones.
Scientists could not immediately establish whether falcarius ate only plants and had given up meat or whether it ate both. However, the feathers present on its body is considered significant as these could be for regulating heat, or used as mating signals, or as camouflage.
Scientists are of the opinion that the existence of falcarius establishes that the therizinosaur species was spread across Asia and North America at a time when the two continents were joined and the beasts and their descendants could migrate far and wide.
