Put a pair of horn-rimmed glasses on that thing and it would look just like a girl I sat next to in Mrs. Barksdale's 7th grade class at Crowley Junior High School. No kidding deal!!!
Wonder if we're related?
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.
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.
This theropod is more properly an ovisuckor.
Put a pair of horn-rimmed glasses on that thing and it would look just like a girl I sat next to in Mrs. Barksdale's 7th grade class at Crowley Junior High School. No kidding deal!!!
Wonder if we're related?
Wow ... and I've always been glad that cows don't fly.
Nope. Looked just like the birdlike dino-thingy's did.
Hmm, another theory: possibly it was just a general condition of the population at the time...
The Manticore was believed to have three rows of teeth.
Just what the hell good that was supposed to do is at present unknown.
Just what the hell good that was supposed to do is at present unknown.
Betcha it didn't get many offers to intern with the offices of contemporary potentates, if you know what I mean (and I think you do ;-).
I don't think so....
--Boris
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