New Weird Dinosaur Discovered Has Mismatched Parts; A T-Rex with Vegetarian Diet

staff@latinoshealth.com By Staff Writer Apr 28, 2015 08:55 AM EDT

A new species of dinosaur that look like a T-Rex made up of mismatched parts with a vegetarian diet has been discovered.

The dinosaur Chilesaurus diegosuarezi was the size of an ostrich, walked like a Tyrannosaurus rex and had teeth similar to a plant eater, according to Los Angeles Times.

The findings were published last April 27 in the journal, Nature. According to Martin Ezcurra of England's University of Birmingham and one of the authors of the study, "It is like a combination of different dinosaurs in a single species."

Ezcurra helped describe the new species, noting that the animal had different parts of the body that are almost the same to other dinosaurs. The dinosaur had velociraptor arms but had blunt fingers instead of its signature sharp claws, and a pelvis that looks like it belongs to a bird dinosaur.

"When we first found these bones, it was proposed that they belonged to different groups of dinosaurs," Ezcurra told LA Times. "It wasn't until we found a fully articulated specimen that we realized they all belonged to the same animal." The researchers said that Chilesaurus probably came from a line of meat-eating theropods or bipedal dinosaurs that evolved into an herbivore.

The dinosaur with peculiar features was said to have lived more than 140 million years ago. It was named Chilesaurus diegosuarezi because it was found in Chile, while the last part was tribute to the founder of the fossil, Diego Suarez, who dug up the bones in 2005 when he was 7 years old.

"I don't know how the evolution of dinosaurs produced this kind of animal, what kind of ecological pressures must have been at work," according to Fernando Novas of the Bernardino Rivadavia Natural Sciences Museum.

According to a researcher from London's Natural History Museum, Paul Barett, Chilesauraus is one of the most captivating finds in the past 20 years.

"It has an unbelievably weird mixture of anatomical features. If you found isolated bones from this one animal in different places you'd probably conclude that the bones came from completely different dinosaur groups, rather than representing one unusual species," he said via The Guardian.

"Some of the bones look like they belong to an early theropod, others like they belong to a group of weird plant-eating theropods called therizinosauroids and yet others look like they belong to a completely different dinosaur group, the prosauropods. A truly odd mix."

"Its relationships to other dinosaurs are really tricky to pin down because of this mix of features and it wouldn't surprise me if its position in the dinosaur evolutionary tree changes regularly as more people see the material," he said.







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