3,000-Pound ‘Big Bird' Dinosaur Is Discovered

A 3,000-pound "big bird" dinosaur called Gigantoraptor has been discovered by scientists.

The remains of the gigantic, surprisingly bird-like dinosaur — the biggest toothless dinosaur ever found — have been uncovered in the Gobi desert in Inner Mongolia, China, and challenge current understanding about the origin of birds. The find was made when Chinese scientists were being filmed by a Japanese television crew in Erlian Basin.

The animal — which lived in the Late Cretaceous period — about 85 million years ago — has surprised paleontologists as most theories suggest that carnivorous dinosaurs got smaller as they got more bird-like.

Because it has an unusual spongy, lightweight tail and arm bones, the 26-foot dinosaur, which is described today in Nature, has been classed as a new species and genus, dubbed Gigantoraptor erlianensis. It has a formidable 10-inch beak.

Xing Xu at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, and Lin Tan of Long Hao Institute of Geology and Paleontology, Hohhot, carried out an analysis of the skeleton they uncovered together and have grouped the fossil with a family that included the beaked, bird-like Oviraptor because of its unusually shaped jaw.

What is most striking, however, is that at 3,000 pounds, the fossil is about 35-times heavier than other similar feathered oviraptorosaurs.

Gigantoraptor is about 300 times as heavy as primitive feathered peers already known to science.