Newly discovered dinosaur looks like a chicken

[Garrison Hilliard]

We may not know how it tasted, but it certainly looked like a chicken.

A new species of feathered dinosaur — the earliest known bird ancestor —
was recently discovered by a team of paleontologists in Liaoning, China.

What they found there was a remarkably well-preserved,
125-million-year-old fossilized skeleton of the three-foot long animal,
which has been named Jianianhualong tengi.

Jianianhualong tengi is a troodontid dinosaur — one of the bird-like
dinosaurs that are the closest relatives to modern-day birds.

One of the key features of the newly discovered dinosaur was its
asymmetrical feathers, which are wider on one side than the other. This is
a prime factor in the history of animal flight.

"Asymmetrical feathers have been associated with flight capability, but
are also found in species that do not fly, and their appearance was a
major event in feather evolution," the authors write in the study.

It is not clear whether Jianianhualong tengi was capable of flight.

“It is extremely challenging to accurately reconstruct aerodynamic
capabilities in early fossil birds and bird-like dinosaurs because there
is a lot of missing data to deal with,” Michael Pittman, a paleontologist
at the University of Hong Kong and an author of the study, told National
Geographic.

The discovery was published Tuesday in Nature Communications, a
peer-reviewed British journal.

<Pix at site>


https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/sciencefair/2017/05/02/new-feathered-dinosaur-discovered/101196868/