A team of scientists from the University of Utah and the Carnegie and Smithsonian museums of natural history have described a new species of dinosaur that looks like a mixture of a large chicken and a reptile. The discovery of this new species that has been baptized as Anzu wyliei or “chicken from hell”, has been published in the magazine Plos One .
The “chicken from hell” would weigh about 225 kilograms and measure about 4 meters long . It lived 66 million years ago (which would make it coincide with the Tyrannosaurus Rex) in what is today the Hell Creek rock formation (USA), an area known precisely for the findings of a large number of fossils of Triceratops and Tyrannosaurus Rex .
“We named this new dinosaur ‘Hell’s Chicken’ because it resembled a bird and was found in a geological formation called the Hell Creek Formation,” says Hans Sues, a researcher in the department of paleobiology at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. and co-author of the study.
The dinosaur, which resembles a huge bird with sharp claws, and belongs to the oviraptorosaurs , had not been described in science until now. It is a new specimen identified from three partial skeletons collected in Upper Cretaceous sites in North and South Dakota . Its size would prevent it from flying but not moving with great speed on the ground; It is also likely that it fed on both plants and animals due to the construction of its skull and the shape of its beak.
Image credit: Mark Klingler, Carnegie Museum of Natural History
