London – Dinosaurs come in all shapes and sizes but there has been nothing quite so unusual as a species found in the Patagonian fossil fields of Chile, scientists said yesterday.
A study of the 150-million-year-old remains of a Tyrannosaurus-like dinosaur showed that although it shared many of the features of its more fearsome carnivorous cousin, it grazed exclusively on plants.
Scientists studying the anatomy of Chilesaurus diegosuarezi said that it is the “platypus” of dinosaurs, because of its bizarre combination of specialised features normally seen in quite unrelated animals – similar to the egg-laying, fur-covered features of the duck-billed platypus.
It is distinguished from the others by a long neck and proportionally small skull with flat, leaf-shaped teeth for grinding vegetable matter.
“Chilesaurus provides a good example of how evolution works in deep time and it is one of the most interesting cases of convergent evolution documented in the history of life,” said Dr Martin Ezcurra of Birmingham University, who was part of the Chilean-led team whose study is reported in the journal Nature.
Chilesaurus diegosuarezi is named after a seven-year-old boy, Diego Suarez, who was the first person to discover its fossil remains while searching for decorative stones with his family in Ayzen, south of Chilean Patagonia.
The Independent