Big Bird Fossil Found in North China
Ali G. once said, “Yo. Science. What is it all about? Is it good or is it whack?” For Chinese paleontologists who found the remains of giant birdlike dinosaur in Inner Mongolia’s Gobi Desert, science is certainly not whack. The discovery, announced Wednesday in the journal Nature, throws a wrench in the commonly believed evolutionary theory of birds, with which I’m sure all of you are all familiar. Science, which I have always thought was good, teaches us that dinosaurs became smaller as they evolved into birds and that the bigger dinosaurs did not have birdlike characteristics. Well, the fossil demonstrates that this new species, which scientists are referring to as the “Gigantoraptor” or if you’re a stickler for binomial nomenclature, “gigantoraptor elrianensis,” was bigger than scientists believed birdlike dinosaurs ever were. The Big Bird specimen was 26 feet long, 16 feet tall, weighed 3000 pounds and roamed China around 700 million years ago. A New York Times report Wednesday played down the Chinese discovery saying that it teaches us less about dinosaurs and more about birds. And I think they have actual science writers there. However, the Times supports the breakthrough that birds did not evolve quite as we believed they did. Xing Xu, the lead paleontologist of the Chinese Academy of Science team that found the fossil, said that while Big Bird was closer to a bird, it was the size of a Tyrannosaurus Rex and was 35 times larger and 300 times as heavy as its closest bird relative. Xu said in in the paper on the finding, “This is like having a mouse that is the size of a horse or cow.” Scientists believed that the Gigantoraptor had feathers, though the feathers they were not preserved during the animal’s 700-million-year burial. And while herbivorous dinosaurs have small heads and long necks and carnivorous dinosaurs have sharp claws, the Gigantoraptor had all of these features and thus, it has yet to be determined what this dinosaur ate. What we can determine from this finding is that our knowledge of the dinosaurs remains limited. The fossilized head of the Gigantoraptor is on display in Beijing. Creationists, eat your heart out.
•NYT: 70 Million Years Ago, Birdlike Giant in China
•Nature: Giant Bird-Like Dinosaur Found