Happy New Year! A Discovery of a New Chicken-Sized, Feathered meat-eating Dinosaur!

I'm kicking off the new year with a new dinosaur find, and this one is really cool and unique!! According to Science News, there was a discovery of the first feathered dinosaur fossil found in the Southern Hemisphere and it's a chicken-sized carnivore. This dinosaur also had some weird projectiles from its shoulders.  It DOES look like a Chicken bred with a dinosaur, but remember, Modern-day birds came from dinosaurs, so this one looks like a link between them! 

 Here's the story and an artist's rendition.

A newfound feathered dinosaur sported fuzz and weird rods on its shoulders

By John Pickrell, Science News Dec. 15, 2020

The fossil of a chicken-sized, meat eater from Brazil that had a mane of fluffy filaments and a pair of stiff, ribbon-like streamers emerging from both shoulders is the first dinosaur with feathers ever discovered in the Southern Hemisphere.

Named Ubirajara jubatus, the plucky predator lived 110 million years ago and probably used its unusual shoulder feathers and mane for display purposes to attract mates and ward off rivals, an international team of researchers reports online December 13 in Cretaceous Research.

 

The name Ubirajara means “lord of the spear”’ and comes from the local Tupi Indigenous language, while jubatus comes from the Latin for maned or crested.

 

Many dinosaurs from the supercontinent of Gondwana, which covered much of the southern half of the planet during the Cretaceous Period, were assumed to have had feathers, but it’s exciting to finally have direct evidence, says study coauthor David Martill, a paleontologist at the University of Portsmouth in England. 

“These [shoulder] structures are really elaborate; they made this animal look pretty spectacular, just as a bird of paradise looks spectacular [today],” he says. “When birds have these sorts of feathers, they do all sorts of posh dances and displays, so this dinosaur looks like it was a little show-off.”

The dinosaur is also interesting, because it is a member of the compsognathid group, which branched off from the family tree of carnivorous dinosaurs fairly early in the history of the group, Martill says. That suggests that the use of feathers for complex display purposes may have a very ancient history within the carnivorous dinosaurs.

FULL ARTICLE: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/dinosaur-fuzz-rods-feathers-first-southern-hemisphere?utm_source=email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=latest-newsletter-v2&utm_source=Latest_Headlines&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Latest_Headlines