Scientists detailed a dragon-like dinosaur with feathered wings and determined it to be an ancestor to the Velociraptor and possibly a predecessor to birds.
According to BBC News, authors of a study published in the journal Scientific Reports described the Zhenyuanlong dinosaur, which commemorates the paleontologist who discovered the fossil while also classifying it as a dragon.
"This new dinosaur is one of the closest cousins of Velociraptor, but it looks just like a bird," Steve Brusatte, the lead researcher on the study from the University of Edinburgh, said in a press release. "It's a dinosaur with huge wings made up of quill pen feathers, just like an eagle or a vulture. The movies have it wrong - this is what Velociraptor would have looked like too."
The 125-million-year-old fossil was discovered in northeastern China and, fortunately for the study authors, the dinosaur's skeleton was apparently covered in volcanic lava, leaving the fossil preserved extraordinarily well in limestone.
"The western part of Liaoning Province in China is one of the most famous places in the world for finding dinosaurs," study lead author Junchang Lü, of the Institute of Geology, Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences, said in the release. "The first feathered dinosaurs were found here and now our discovery of Zhenyuanlong indicates that there is an even higher diversity of feathered dinosaurs than we thought. It's amazing that new feathered dinosaurs are still being found."
Brusatte, a co-author on the study, told BBC News the fossil "[was] the single most beautiful fossil I have had the privilege to work on." He also said it has managed to be even more unique than dinosaurs and other beasts invented in Hollywood.
"It will blow some people's minds to realise that those dinosaurs in the movies would have been even weirder," he said, "and I think even scarier - like big fluffy birds from hell."
