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World News|
Wednesday, September 18, 2002 - Web posted at 10:32:08 GMT Weird dino looks like a cross between T. Rex and B. Bunny PARIS, Sept 18 (AFP) - The world's greatest team of fossil hunters are scratching their heads over their latest find -- a unique dinosaur whose distant cousins were mighty carnivores yet which has two bucky front teeth, rather like a rabbit's. |
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The creature has many of the features of the oviraptor, a small two-legged dinosaur that, as a theropod, was distantly related to the Tyrannosaurus rex. Instead of having the carnivore's typically long, sharp teeth, oviraptors had a rounded, parrot-like beak which they used to steal eggs from nests. But the oddity unearthed by Xing Xu at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing is quite different. It has a low, long skull and small cheek teeth and two buck teeth at the front. The teeth are significant because they show that theropods were not just meat-eaters. "These dental features were previously unknown among theropods and suggest a herbivorous diet," Xu's team report Thursday in the British weekly science journal, Nature. "The new discovery provides a case of convergent evolution and demonstrates that non-avian theropods were much more diverse ecologically than previously suspected." The creature, which lived more than 128 million years ago, was found at a site in Liaoning province where Xu and his colleagues have already unearthed dozens of remarkable finds, including feathered specimens that shed light on the evolution of dinosaurs to birds. It has been named Incisivosaurus gauthieri, in honour of its unusual teeth and of Jacques Gauthier, a Yale paleontologist who wrote a ground-breaking work in 1986 that traced the lineage to modern-day birds. ri/ss Nampa-AFP WEB story ENDS (NAMPA 180841) |
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