Savvy Chinese dinosaur hints at link to birds
ABC ONLINE 15/02/2002
Chinese fossil hunters believe a small, savvy dinosaur that lived 130 million years ago
may provide useful clues about the origin of birds.
The partial skull and skeleton of the two-footed theropod dinosaur was found in Liaoning,
a Chinese province that has been a fabulous trove of fossils, the researchers report in
the latest edition of scientific journal Nature.
The creature, which was probably under a metre long, has been named Sinovenator changii -
"Chang's hunter of China" - in honour of Meeman Chang, a member of the Institute
of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) at the Chinese Academy of Sciences
in Beijing.
A team led by IVPP's Xing Xu believes Sinovenator was an early troodontid - an enigmatic
dinosaur that had large eyes, probably to enable it to hunt at night, and may have been
pretty smart, for it had an unusually large brain for its size.
They say Sinovenator has a number of bird-like features that are found in Archaeopteryx,
the earliest feather-covered fossil to be identified as a bird, as well in small
carnivorous dinosaurs called dromaeosaurids.
Sinovenator thus gives an idea as to when the dinosaur clan split, with one branch that
later became birds and another that evolved into the meat-eating hunters of folklore, they
suggest.
Many scientists believe birds evolved from dinosaurs, although others dispute the theory.
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OF REPORT
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