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New fossils help scientists reconstruct humpbacked dinosaur

"Even for dinosaurs, it's peculiar," Thomas Holtz said.

By Brooks Hays
An artistic reconstruction of the newly reconstructed dinosaur Deinocheirus mirificus. (Yuong-Nam Lee/KIGAM)
An artistic reconstruction of the newly reconstructed dinosaur Deinocheirus mirificus. (Yuong-Nam Lee/KIGAM)

DAEJEON, South Korea, Oct. 22 (UPI) -- It's a duck. It's a camel. It's an ostrich. No, it's Deinocheirus mirificus, the duck-camel-ostrich dino. Deinocheirus mirificus translates as "unusual horrible hands." But it's not just the hands of D. mirificus that are strange, its whole body is an odd hodgepodge of awkward features -- the nose of a duckbill, the sail-like hump of a camel, the outstretched neck of an ostrich, not to mention the long arms and human-like hands.

"Even for dinosaurs, it's peculiar," Thomas Holtz, a paleontologist at the University of Maryland, told Businessweek. "It does emphasize the fact that we need to keep on going out in the field to look for things, because we're still just scratching the surface."

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D. mirificus was first named in 1965 after being uncovered in the Gobi Desert; but because only its odd forearms and hands were discovered, paleontologists were forced to speculate (sometimes wildly) about its appearance. Some suggested the 70 million-year-old dino was a tree-climbing sloth, because of its long arms and giant, clawed hands.

But researchers now have a more accurate rendering of "horrible hands" thanks to newly acquired fossils. Researchers from the Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources, as well as the Mongolian Academy of Sciences, were able to fill in the missing pieces of the dinosaur's skeleton by recovering fossils from collectors buying and selling smuggled bones on the black market.

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Having now reconstructed D. mirificus, scientists know the humpbacked dino stood heavily on two hind legs, with long awkward arms and bill-like snout. The dinosaur could grow up to 40 feet tall and weigh nearly seven tons. Far from agile, D. mirificus likely just waded slowly along river banks, eating small animals, plants and fish.

"The discovery of the original specimen almost half a century ago suggested that this was an unusual dinosaur, but did not prepare us for how distinctive Deinocheirus is -- a true cautionary tale in predicting body forms from partial skeletons," Korean paleontologist Young-Nam Lee wrote of the discovery.

The newly reimagined dino was detailed by Lee and his colleagues in a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

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