This video says about itself:
22 October 2014
This computer animation shows Deinocheirus mirificus walking. Deinocheirus had unusually large forearms and several features that seem cobbled together from a variety of other dinosaurs.
From daily The Independent in Britain:
Fossils reveal very awkward dinosaur once roamed the Earth
Christopher Hooton
Thursday 23 October 2014
Palaeontologists in Mongolia’s Gobi Desert have discovered new fossils that allow them to create a picture of what one of the most unusually-shaped dinosaurs looked like.
Deinocheirus mirificus, which means “unusual horrible hand” in Latin, was a bipedal dinosaur with a hump-back and a big belly that stood almost as tall as the Tyrannosaurus rex.
The fossils were described in a study in the journal Nature, with vertebrate palaeontologist Thomas Holtz, Jr commenting: “This is definitely an unusual animal.
“It had more of a ‘beer belly’ than your typical ornithomimosaur.”
Palaeontologists recovered fossils from three individuals from the species in the Gobi Desert, and were able to combine them with some previously stolen by poachers to create a 95% complete skeleton of the dinosaur.
Its unusual combination of features has scientists puzzled.
“This creature wasn’t built for speed,” said Stephen Brusatte a palaeontologist at the University of Edinburgh. “That’s pretty obvious.”
Deinocheirus had wide hips and large toes, which made for an awkward gait as seen in the animation above.
🙂
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I remember this one from when I was still in college in the late 1960s. All that were known then were its arms and hands — thus its name.
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Yes, discoveries in paleontology often come slowly and with interruptions.
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I remember when they discovered that the original ‘brontosaurus’ skeleton was actually the improperly combined skeletons of a diplodicus and a brachiosaurus. Brontosaurus never existed. MIchael Crighton had just published the first Jurassic Park book and he had to put out a second version substituting his brontosaurus interactions with brachiosaurus 🙂
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Hi, you are right about ‘Brontosaurus’ being an invalid combination of two dinosaur species. However, these two species were Apatosaurus and Camarasaurus; not Diplodocus and Brachiosaurus:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apatosaurus#Discovery_and_species
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