New chicken-sized dinosaur baffles paleontologists
Small Foskia Pelendonum Scientists say this was a plant-eating dinosaur with a “weird” anatomy
dinosaur reconstruction Foskia palendonum.
A tiny plant-eating dinosaur the size of a chicken that occupied northern Spain about 125 million years ago is baffling scientists.
Early Cretaceous creature described in new paper published on sunday in papers in paleontology.
dinosaur, Foskia Pelendonum— named for the Greek words for “light” and “foraging” — was about half a meter long, with an unusual skull and teeth that suggest “a new way of foraging” behavior, the authors write.
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“Its anatomy is strange in exactly the same way as evolutionary trees are rewritten,” said Penelope Cruzado-Caballero, an associate professor at the University of La Laguna in Spain and author of the paper. statement.
development path of F. Pelendonum Compared to an adult chicken.
The new species could help paleontologists better understand the lineage of ornithischians, or “bird croaking“Dinosaurs.
“From the beginning, we knew these bones were extraordinary because of their small size,” said Fidel Torcida Fernández-Baldor, co-author of the new research and director of the Dinosaur Museum in Salas de los Infantes, Spain, who first discovered the fossils, in the same statement. “Equally impressive is how the study of this animal overturns global views on the evolution of ornithopod dinosaurs.”
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