This newly named ancient beast is a kind of cavalry similar to birds, bipedal dinosaur, closely related to raptors. The researchers named it Albertaavenator curriei to commemorate the Canadian province where it was discovered, its tracking tendency (venator means "hunter" in Latin) and the famous Canadian paleontologist Philip Currie.
"The delicate bones of these little feathered dinosaurs are very rare," David Evans, senior curator and principal researcher of vertebrate paleontology at the Royal Ontario Museum, said in a statement. . Fortunately, there is a key fragment on our skull, which enables us to distinguish the Alberta bird as a new species. Photo: Raptor's cousin has short arms and many feathers.
The fossil forehead comes from Kentaro bird in Chiba, Alberta. The researchers found two fossils formed in Horseshoe Canyon, Red Deer Valley in Alberta and forehead fragments of curriei in southern Edmonton. Evans said that a large fossil was found in 1993, which may belong to an adult, and a smaller fossil was found in 1996, which may come from a small individual. Both kinds of fossils are kept in the Royal tyrael Museum in Alberta, and they were not studied before the new researchers decided to investigate them.
In its lifetime, the larger A.curriei may stand at the height of an adult's chest or waist. Evans told Life Science magazine in an email that it weighs about 132 pounds (60 kilograms). He added that its strange serrated teeth suggested that it might be an omnivore.
This photo shows the comparison between big Couriere, a bird in Alberta, and adult birds. (Provided by Oliver Dimit) "We hope to find a more complete Alberta bird skeleton in the future, because it will tell us more about this fascinating animal," Evans said in a statement.
These two kinds of fossils are extremely rare. The researchers wrote in the research report that the non-toothed dinosaur fossils found in North America in the late Cretaceous (7265438+ 10,000 years ago to 66 million years ago) were almost unheard of. In fact,
According to the researchers, in the late Cretaceous, there were only four known varieties of agave in North America: agave in Montana, agave in stearns, Alberta, pectin in Rombach, Wyoming and Taras sampson in Utah. Paleontologists believe that the Couriere fossil belongs to Formosa and is a close relative who lived 76 million years ago. However, the researchers said that the analysis of the forehead fossils showed that the newly discovered specimen was shorter and stronger than Trypanosoma Taiwan Province and belonged to Albert Coriell's skull.
Part of. (Thanks to Chiba, Kentaro) Complicated thing, teeth look the same from A.curriei and T.formosus, which means they can't be used to distinguish the two species. The researchers said that this discovery shows that some of the hundreds of isolated teeth thought to be Trypanosoma Taiwan Province may actually belong to Trypanosoma Corei.
"This discovery really highlights the importance of finding and examining these rare dinosaur bone materials," said research collaborator Derek Larsen, assistant curator of the Philip J Currie Dinosaur Museum, in a statement. "Given the difficulty of identifying Cory dinosaurs, other small dinosaurs are probably avoiding the attention of paleontologists." . If so, the diversity of dinosaurs in North America is greater than before.