CBC Quirks & Quarks – New dinosaur had duck legs, a swan neck and penguin flippers

CBC Radio’s Quirks & Quarks has a segment about a new dinosaur discovery.  The new species is called Halszkaraptor and it lived during the Cretaceous Period about 71 to 75 million years ago in what is present day Mongolia.  The original paper appeared in Nature.

Halskaraptor was somewhere between the size of a chicken and a turkey. It had an unusual array of features never seen before in one dinosaur. Halszkaraptor had a heron-like neck, flipper-type forelimbs much like a penguin, and webbed feet similar to those of a duck. Dr. Philip Currie, a professor and Canada Research Chair in Dinosaur Palaeobiology at the University of Alberta, determined that these features means it spent some time living in or very near water much like a shore-bird, which is very rare for a dinosaur. The long neck and more than 100 teeth indicate that it was able to snag small fish and insects in the water.

 

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