He had been brought to the United States by fossil dealers, and after a long negotiation, Baby Louie returned to China in 2013, where scientists were once again able to study him.īy examining the fossil in new detail and comparing it to other dinosaur species, the international team of scientists can now conclude that not only is Baby Louie a new species to science, but that his kind were the largest known dinosaurs to sit on their nests and care for young. Now, Beibeilong is the second giant oviraptor species discovered.Īt that point, the scientists had another problem studying Baby Louie: China wanted him back. We had a giant species that was able to lay these giant eggs,” Zelenitsky says. It wasn’t until 2007 that the first giant oviraptor skeleton was discovered in China, a 3,000-pound feathered beast known as Gigantoraptor. “The only problem was that these eggs were way too big-about eight to 10 times larger than any known oviraptor!” Zelenitsky says. See what we know and don't know about the age of dinos.īut soon after the article was published, the researchers began to think that it looked more like an oviraptor. They ruled the Earth for more than 160 million years, but much about how dinosaurs lived and died remains a mystery. Others thought they came from tyrannosaurs. In the 1996 article, Baby Louie was said to belong to a group of dinosaurs known for its huge clawed hands, called therizinosaurs, because that was one of few contenders large enough to lay the eggs. ( See more of Baby Louie and other dinosaur eggs in a special feature. The magazine commissioned artist Brian Cooley to build a detailed 3-D model and featured a photograph of the sculpture on its cover. The well-preserved dinosaur attracted the attention of National Geographic magazine, which dubbed the fossilized embryo “Baby Louie” after the story’s photographer, Louis Psihoyas. When the fossil egg was found in Henan, China, around early 1993, no one knew its species, so like other mysterious giant eggs it was given the scientific name Macroelongatollithus. “The eggs are telling us that these dinosaurs were probably much more common than what their bones are revealing in the fossil record,” Zelenitsky says. What’s more, the discovery suggests that enormous bird-like oviraptors may once have roamed wherever the giant eggs are found. Now that we know who laid the strange eggs, researchers could learn more about how these animals reproduced and reared their young, says paleontologist David Varricchio of Montana State University, who was not part of the new study. The enormous eggs have been found in China, Korea, Mongolia, and the United States, but for many years it was a mystery what kind of dinosaur they belonged to.
(Read more about feathered dinosaurs in First Dinosaur Tail Found Preserved in Amber.) Only three skeletons of giant oviraptors have been found, including Baby Louie, “but their eggs are extremely common,” Zelenitsky says. The dinosaur belonged to a birdlike group known as oviraptors, most of which were fairly small. Beibeilong would have towered over an ostrich, though adults may have been more than 25 feet long and weighed more than three tons. “I imagine them as very birdlike,” says study co-author Darla Zelenitsky, a paleontologist at the University of Calgary-much like an overgrown cassowary, an ostrich relative. Scientists who recently studied the 90-million-year-old fossil in detail have called it Beibeilong sinensis, or “baby dragon from China,” according to a study published May 9 in the journal Nature Communications. The newly described species was a giant bird-like dinosaur that laid eggs up to two feet long in nests the size of a monster truck tire. More than 20 years after gracing the cover of National Geographic as “Baby Louie,” a tiny dinosaur found curled inside its egg, finally has an official name: baby dragon.
0 kommentar(er)
