The specimen has been known in scientific circles for several years, but only by its nickname ‘Lori’, or as ‘the Lori specimen’. Yet, it had remained the subject of unpublished research until now. The study was published in PeerJ, co-author Dean Lomax is a palaeontologist and visiting scientist at The University of Manchester who first saw the specimen in 2008 (then aged 18).

“I remember the first time I laid my eyes on this little dinosaur. Even back then, I knew it was a significant discovery. But, it wasn’t until 2015 when our dino team formed and we began to study ‘Lori’ in much more detail than ever before. In fact, the project took a major step forward with a successful crowdfunding campaign launched through experiment.com in 2016, for which we are grateful to everybody who kindly donated and helped make this project happen”.

Lori has also now received its formal, scientific name, Hesperornithoides miessleri. Hesperornithoides is a combination of ‘Hesper’, referring to the discovery in the American West, and ‘ornis’ for the bird-like form of the dinosaur, whereas the species name honours the Miessler family, whose land the specimen was found on and who have been avid supporters of the project.

One of the other key findings of the study relates to the origin of avian (bird) flight. In particular, Hesperornithoides is a highly terrestrial proto-bird, suggesting that many features we associate with being bird-like evolved in dinosaurs that lived out their lives on the ground.

Lead author and PhD candidate at The University of Wisconsin-Madison, Scott Hartman said: “We wanted to expand the dataset used to test dinosaur-bird relationships, so we added hundreds of new species and tens of thousands of new characters. We found that Lori is a primitive member of a group of dinosaurs that includes Troodon, but perhaps more importantly we discovered that the smaller details of the family tree of bird-like dinosaurs isn’t quite as resolved as some researchers would claim.”

Hartman continued: “For example, it only takes a few changes in the dataset for Hesperornithoides to be found as a closer relative of Velociraptor than of Troodon. One robust finding we did come up with is that even as the interrelationships changed, the primitive members of all these groups were non-flying ground dwelling dinosaurs. That means that some small relatives of Velociraptor such as Microraptor that looks like it could have glided evolved this separately from the modern bird family.”