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Miniature carnivore dinosaurs roamed North America
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Miniature carnivore dinosaurs roamed North America
AFP - Wednesday, March 18
WASHINGTON (AFP) - - Meat-eating dinosaurs the size of a small chicken roamed areas of North America 75 million years ago, according to research by Canadian paleontologists.
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The mini-dinosaur, similar in appearance to the Velociraptor, is named Hesperonychus elizabethae and is the smallest carnivorous dinosaur known to have lived in North America.
"Hesperonychus is currently the smallest dinosaur known from North America," said University of Calgary paleontologist Nick Longrich. "Its discovery just emphasizes how little we actually know, and it raises the possibility that there are even smaller ones out there."
Longrich, together with University of Alberta paleontologist Philip Currie, are authors of a study on the small creature that appears in the March 16 edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Hesperonychus weighed about two kilograms (4.4 pounds) and stood about 50 centimeters (19 inches) tall. It ran on two legs and, like Velociraptor -- the deadly, agile dinosaurs made famous in the Jurassic Park movies -- had razor-sharp teeth and a large sickle-shaped claw.
"Judging by the amount of material that was collected, we believe animals the size of Hesperonychus must have been quite common on the landscape," Longrich said in a statement.
Hesperonychus probably hunted and ate insects, mammals, amphibians and maybe even baby dinosaurs that lived in the marshes and forests common in the area during the late Cretaceous period, the scientists said.
The Hesperonychus fossils were collected in 1982 from several sites, including the Dinosaur Provincial Park in the western province of Alberta, famous for its rich dinosaur fossil beds.
However the fossils remained unstudied until 2007.
"The claws were thought to come from juveniles -- they were just so small," Longrich said. "But when we studied the pelvis, we found the hip bones were fused, which would only have happened once the animal was fully grown."
Small carnivorous dinosaurs "seemed to be completely absent from the environment, which seemed bizarre because today, the small carnivores outnumber the big ones," Longrich said.
"It turns out that they were here and they played a more important role in the ecosystem than we realized. So for the past 100 years, we've completely overlooked a major part of North America's dinosaur community."
In 2008 Currie and Longrich discovered another, slightly larger North American dinosaur, an insectivore named Albertonykus borealis.
Until now, "the smallest carnivorous dinosaurs we have seen in North America have been about the size of a wolf," Longrich said.
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The skeleton of a Cryolophosaurus Ellioti on display at the National Science Museum in Tokyo. The remains of the Jurassic dinosaur were discovered in Antarctica in 1990. Canadian paleontologists said meat-eating dinosaurs the size of a small chicken roamed areas of North America 75 million years ago.
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