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.
--Boris
Today in Odd History, Jimmy Carter was attacked by a rabbit during a fishing trip in Plains, Georgia. The rabbit, which may have been fleeing a predator, swam toward his boat, "hissing menacingly, its teeth flashing and nostrils flared." President Carter was forced to swat at the vicious beast with a canoe paddle, which apparently scared it off.
LOL!
ARTHUR: Now what happens?
BEDEVERE: Well now, Launcelot, Galahad, and I wait until nightfall and then leap out of the rabbit and take the French by surprise, not only by surprise but totally unarmed!
ARTHUR: Who ... Who breaks out?
BEDEVERE: Er ... We ... Launcelot, Galahad, and I ... Er ... leap out of the rabbit and ... [LAUNCELOT covers his eyes.]
BEDEVERE: Look, if we were to build a large wooden badger...
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