World's Best-Preserved Dinosaur Fossil Unveiled in Royal Tyrrell Museum1:10
A well-preserved 110-million-year-old dinosaur found in a mine pit in Canada is now display at the Royal Tyrrell Museum.
A SMUGGLED fossil has revealed a bizarre swanlike creature with razor-sharp “killer claws” and a duck-billed snout — and it has left scientists baffled.
The beast, which some are dubbing the “swanasaurus”, would have walked the earth 75 million years ago.
It is stumping experts because it is one of the only semiaquatic dinosaurs discovered and they believe its flippers and long ostrich-like legs would have made it adept at moving on both water and land.
“It’s such a peculiar animal,” said Dennis Voeten, a palaeontology researcher at Palacky University in the Czech Republic, speaking with AP.
“It combines different parts we knew from other groups into this one small animal.”
The creature, about 45cm tall and its full curled-up skeleton was found in a sandstone rock.
“When I saw the fossil the first time, I was shocked,” said Andrea Cau, a palaeontologist at the University of Bologna and co-author of the study, speaking with National Geographic.
“The fossil was so complete, beautifully preserved, and at the same time so enigmatic and bizarre, with a completely unexpected mix of strange features. It was the most exciting challenge for a palaeontologist.”
However, he said his team were highly suspicious about the fossil — both because of how strange it looked and the fact that the rock containing the skeleton had been smuggled out of Mongolia and left in a private collector’s hands.
“I asked myself, ‘Is this a real, natural skeleton, or an artefact, a chimera? If this is a fake, how could I demonstrate it?’” Mr Cau told AP.
“Assuming it was a fake instead of starting assuming that the fossil is genuine was the most appropriate way to start the investigation of such a bizarre fossil.”
The team says the beast, which could have grown to the size of a turkey, is a breakthrough for scientists, because it is the first two-legged, meat-eating dinosaur discovered which can swim.
“What is very special about it is that it looks very weird. It doesn’t look like any other dinosaur that we know so far,” said Vincent Fernandez, a palaeontologist at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, speaking with The Guardian.
“When we add up all the [characteristics] it shows that it was an amphibious animal — it was able to run on land, as we imagine dinosaurs running around, and on top of that it was able to go into water.”
In a study released on Wednesday by the journal Nature, Mr Voeten and co-authors named it Halszkaraptor escuilliei (HAHL-shka-rap-tor ES-key-lay-ee) or “Halszka” after the late Polish palaeontologist Halszka Osmolska.
The team did numerous tests on the fossil using a powerful X-ray generator to determine what it would have looked like.