Palaeontology

T. rex's vegetarian cousin unearthed in Chile

By T.K. Randall
April 28, 2015 ·  8 comments

Chilesaurus was a vegetarian therapod. Image Credit: CC BY-SA 2.0 Greg Willis Named Chilesaurus diegosuarezi after the country in which it was first discovered, the peculiar-looking dinosaur was a bizarre amalgamation of several other species with a bird-like beak for eating plants and strong hind legs like those of a therapod.

Its unique mix of physical characteristics has since earned it the nickname 'the Platypus' after the semi-aquatic duck-billed Australian mammal that was originally thought to be a hoax when explorers first reported seeing it back in the late 18th century.

"Chilesaurus constitutes one of the most bizarre dinosaurs ever found," said study co-author Fernando Novas of Argentina's Natural History Museum."At the beginning, I was convinced that we had collected three different dinosaurs, but when the most complete skeleton was prepared, it (became) evident that all the elements pertained to a single dinosaur species."

Describing the creature as an "evolutionary jigsaw puzzle", Novas and his team believe that Chilesaurus represents a whole new type of therapod dinosaur that could change, among other things, our current understanding of the evolution of birds.

The pint-sized oddity is thought to have lived at the very end of the Jurassic era around 145 million years ago, well before its much bigger cousin Tyrannosaurus rex ever appeared on the scene.

Source: ABC.net.au | Comments (8)

Tags: Tyrannosaurus, Dinosaur