Everywhere scientists look it seems like they are finding dinosaurs. A new species is emerging at the astounding pace of one per week. And this continues with the announcement of perhaps the strangest dinosaur find over the past few years: the toothless, hump-backed, super-clawed omnivore Deinocheirus mirificus that lived about 70 million years ago in what is now Mongolia.
Deinocheirus may even become a household name, thanks to spectacular new fossils from the Gobi Desert reported by South Korean paleontologist Young-Nam Lee and colleagues, who published their results in Nature. It is a one-of-a kind dinosaur – a creature so astoundingly weird that the world just can’t help take notice.
Half a Century of Wild Speculation
It has been a banner year for dinosaur discoveries. First it was the “chicken from hell” and a dwarf tyrannosaur announced in the spring, then the long-snouted carnivore “Pinocchio rex” and the feathery glider Changyuraptor in the summer – and, over the past couple of months, we have been awed by the 65-ton, long-necked behemoth Dreadnoughtus and wowed by remarkable new fossils of the sail-backed, shark-eating Spinosaurus from Africa.
But Deinocheirus isn’t actually a new dinosaur. It has been known about for more than 50 years. As is often the case with dinosaurs, Deinocheirus was first reported based on a couple of bones that were enough to show scientists that they had found a new species, but not nearly enough to give a complete picture of where this species fit into the family tree, what it ate and how it interacted with other dinosaurs.
