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Jurassic Missing Link
Unearthed In Utah

The Economic Times - India
5-7-5
 
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Birdlike dinosaurs newly unearthed in Utah may be a missing link between primitive meat-eating creatures and more evolved vegetarians, US researchers reported on Wednesday. The 125m-year-old fossils show features of two-legged carnivorous dinosaurs called maniraptorans, from which birds are believed to have evolved, they said.
 
The fossils also have leaf-shaped teeth, stubby legs and the expansive bellies of plant-eaters, the researchers reported in this week's issue of the journal Nature. The new species is named Falcarius utahensis, meaning "sickle-maker from Utah".
 
"Falcarius is literally a missing link," Scott Sampson, chief curator at the Utah Museum of Natural History, told a news conference. "Falcarius is kind of half-raptor and half herbivore. This transition is triggered by a shift in diet." It appeared at around the time that tasty, nutritious, flowering plants appeared on earth, he said.
 
"We know that the first dinosaur was a small-bodied, lightly built, fleet-footed predator," Sampson added. All other dinosaurs evolved from it. "However, as with many radiations of major groups of animals, it happened so quickly that we really don't have much in the way of fossil documentation." Falcarius provides part of the picture, he said.
 
The adult Falcarius would have walked on two legs and was about 13 feet long and 4.5 feet tall. It had strong forearms, sharp, curved, 4-inch (10 centimeter) claws and a long neck. It probably had feathers and is the earliest North American example of a therizinosaur, a group that includes feathered dinosaurs found in southeast China and maniraptorans, including the Velociraptor, perhaps best known from the novel and film 'Jurassic Park'.
 
"(It) is the most primitive known therizinosaur, demonstrating unequivocally that this large-bodied bizarre herbivorous group of dinosaurs came from Velociraptor-like ancestors," said Lindsay Zanno, a graduate student in geology and geophysics who worked on the study.
 
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http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1101626.cms

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