LIke this, only with fangs?
Posted on 09/18/2002 12:41:30 PM PDT by SteveH
New Dino Resembles T. Rex, B. Bunny
AFP
The Buck-Toothed Beauty
Sep. 18 — The world's greatest team of fossil hunters are scratching their heads over their latest find — a unique dinosaur whose distant cousins were mighty carnivores, yet which has two bucky front teeth, rather like a rabbit's.
The creature has many of the features of the oviraptor, a small two-legged dinosaur that, as a theropod, was distantly related to the Tyrannosaurus rex.
Instead of having the carnivore's typically long, sharp teeth, oviraptors had a rounded, parrot-like beak which they used to steal eggs from nests.
But the oddity unearthed by Xing Xu at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing is quite different. It has a low, long skull and small cheek teeth and two buck teeth at the front. The teeth are significant because they show that theropods were not just meat-eaters.
"These dental features were previously unknown among theropods and suggest a herbivorous diet," Xu's team report Thursday in the British weekly science journal, Nature. "The new discovery provides a case of convergent evolution and demonstrates that non-avian theropods were much more diverse ecologically than previously suspected."
The creature, which lived more than 128 million years ago, was found at a site in Liaoning province where Xu and his colleagues have already unearthed dozens of remarkable finds, including feathered specimens that shed light on the evolution of dinosaurs to birds.
The newest find has been named Incisivosaurus gauthieri, in honor of its unusual teeth and of Jacques Gauthier, a Yale paleontologist who wrote a ground-breaking work in 1986 that traced the lineage to modern-day birds.
LIke this, only with fangs?
Bring out the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch.
I am not convinced. It is however probably easiest for scientists to explain the unknown in terms of the known-- here, for example, we are asked to believe that this creature actually had a lifestyle resembling that of a large tuber-eating, burrowing varmint. They probably threw in the feathers to satisfy the latest in dinosaur theory fashion (warm blooded, hollow boned, bird ancestor, etc.)
Personally, I would have rendered it to look more like the recent descriptions of Chupacabra. (Guess that explains why I am not a paleontologist. :O)
What next, a dino that resembles Foghorn Leghorn?
Since many dinosaurs had feathers, they already resemble Foghorn Leghorn - with teeth instead of a beak.
Birds are simply dinosaurs with wings instead of arms, and beaks instead of teeth. Otherwise they are much like dinosaurs.
But did they sound more like Mel Blanc or Kenny Delmar?
There are some mysteries we are not worthy to know the answer to. :-)
Picture dinos clustered on the power line and burying the car in droppings.
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