The Chilesaurus diegosuarezi may be making Theropod dinosaurs that lived in the Jurassic Period even more diverse.
Originating early in the Jurassic and living until the Cretaceous Period, Theropods include dinosaurs such Tyrannosaurus, Velociraptor and Spinosaurus. They are also early ancestors of birds.
According to the Washington Post, the Chilesaurus is being termed "the Platypus" not because it bears a resemblance, but because it too is a blend of its fellows. Authors of a study published in the journal Nature believed the Chilesaurus fossils highly odd because they seemed to have characteristics of more than one species.
"Chilesaurus probably fed upon ferns, araucarians, bennetitaleans, and podocarps - all of which were plants that were abundant at the end of the Jurassic," study lead author Fernando Novas, of the Bernardino Rivadavia Natural Sciences Museum in Buenos Aires, told Discovery News.
The dinosaur's "Chilesaurus" name comes from the country where the fossil was unearthed, but its second name is something else entirely. Diego Suárez, the seven-year-old son of two study contributors, was the first to notice the fossil while he and his family were hiking. When the paleontologists recognized what their son found was a fossil, the entire family turned into a digging team.
"This is a really unusual beastie, a bit of a dinosaur Frankenstein," Lindsay Zanno, a paleontologist at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, told Smithsonian Magazine. "If Chilesaurus's proposed place in the theropod family tree holds up to additional scrutiny, then we have at least three and up to seven instances of theropods adapting to some form of a plant-based diet, one of which may be linked to the origin of the only surviving group of theropod dinosaurs, birds.
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