Nearly 50 years ago, scientists found bones of two large, powerful dinosaur arms in Mongolia and figured they had discovered a fearsome critter with killer claws.
Now scientists have found the rest of the dinosaur and have new descriptions for it: goofy and weird.
The beast probably lumbered along on two legs like a cross between TV dinosaur Barney and Jar Jar Binks of Star Wars fame. It was 16 feet tall and 36 feet long, weighing seven tons, with a duckbill on its head and a hump-like sail on its back.
That’s Deinocheirus mirificus (DY’-noh’-KY-ruhs mur-IHF’-ee-kuhs), which means “terrible hands that look peculiar.” It is newly reimagined after a full skeleton was found in Mongolia and described in a paper released Wednesday by the journal Nature. Some 70 million years old, it’s an ancestral relative of the modern ostrich and belongs to the dinosaur family often called ostrich dinosaurs.
