NEW YORK — A two-story tall dinosaur with the bill of a duck, the hump of a camel and the neck of an ostrich roamed the earth 70 million years ago, according to scientists who pieced together the creature’s unique look using bones reclaimed from private collectors.
“Even for dinosaurs, it’s peculiar,” said Thomas Holtz, a paleontologist at the University of Maryland, of the dinosaur named Deinocheirus mirificus. “It does emphasize the fact that we need to keep on going out in the field to look for things, because we’re still just scratching the surface.”
The species has been a mystery since 1965, when researchers first discovered fragments of its 8-foot-long arms, naming it for its “unusual, terrible hands.” The findings on the creature were published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
Scientists from research centers including the Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources and the Mongolian Academy of Sciences pieced together the image after they reclaimed bones that had been missing for years, sold to private dinosaur fossil collectors on the black market.
The dinosaurs were probably as heavy as a truck, according to the latest report, and they probably used their jaws and giant tongues to help them suction fish and plants from the bottom of freshwater lakes and ponds.
Researchers will use the new information about its appearance to better understand ancient ecology, according to Holtz. The image raised new questions about why duck-billed dinosaurs became gigantic millions of years ago, and how they would have looked as infants, he said.
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