New Carnivorous Feathered Dinosaur Remains Found In New Mexico

The Dineobellator was a coyote-size carnivorous feathered dinosaur. The remains of the said carnivore were found in New Mexico’s San Juan Basin. The newly-discovered dinosaur remains suggested that its unusual tail and claws helped it to hunt and kill during its time. Paleontologist Steven Jasinki said that Deinobellator is a new species from the Late Cretaceous (70-68 million years ago) period, as the Smithsonian magazine detailed: 

Steven Jasinski, a paleontologist at the State Museum of Pennsylvania and lead author of the study in Scientific Reports, says Dineobellator is a new species from the Late Cretaceous (70-68 million years ago) that belongs to dromaeosaurid, a group of clawed predators closely related to birds. These rare fossils have features that suggest raptors were still trying out new ways to compete even during the dinosaurs’ last stand—the era just before the extinction event that wiped them out 66 million years ago. “This group was still evolving, testing out new evolutionary pathways, right at the very end before we lost them,” Jasinski notes.

The name Dineobellator pays homage to the dino’s tenacity and that of the local Native American people. Diné means ‘the Navajo people,’ while bellator is the Latin word for warrior.

“Due to their small size and delicate bones, skeletons of raptors like Dineobellator are extremely rare in North America, particularly in the last 5 million years of the Age of Dinosaurs,” says David Evans, a paleontologist at the Royal Ontario Museum and the University of Toronto, who wasn’t involved in the study. “Even though it is fragmentary, the skeleton of Dineobellator is one of the best specimens known from North America for its time, which makes it scientifically important and exciting.”

image via Smithsonian magazine