New chicken-sized dinosaur baffles paleontologists

New chicken-sized dinosaur baffles paleontologists

By Jackie Flynn Mogensen edited by Claire Cameron

A small herbivorous dinosaur that was about the same size as a chicken and occupied what is now northern Spain about 125 million years ago is baffling scientists.

The Lower Cretaceous creature is described in a new paper published Sunday in Paleontology articles.

The dinosaur, Foskeia pelendonum– named after the Greek words for “light” and “foraging” – was about half a meter long, with an unusual skull and teeth that suggest a “new way of feeding,” the authors write.

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“Its anatomy is strange, precisely in the sense that it rewrites the evolutionary trees,” Penélope Cruzado-Caballero, an associate professor at the University of La Laguna in Spain and an author of the paper, said in a statement.

The new species could help paleontologists better understand the lineage of ornithischians, or “bird-hipped” dinosaurs.

“From the beginning, we knew that these bones were exceptional because of their small size,” said Fidel Torcida Fernández-Baldor, co-author of the new research and director of the Dinosaur Museum in Salas de los Infantes, Spain, which first discovered the fossils, in the same statement. “It is equally impressive to see how the study of this animal shakes up global ideas about the evolution of ornithopod dinosaurs.”

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