A newly discovered duck-like dinosaur had a neck like a goose and claws like velociraptors
Dinosaur was most likely semiaquatic, a trait that hadn’t been found in dinosaurs before
By Kevin Loria
Birds are the modern incarnation of dinosaurs.
But some modern birds live in ways that we haven’t observed in the dinosaur kingdom. Ducks, for example, alternate between water and land habitats, able to take advantage of both.
Until now, that hadn’t been seen in dinosaurs, but the discovery of a duck-like dinosaur from Mongolia may change that.
The new dinosaur, named Halszkaraptor escuilliei, was announced today in the journal Nature. The remarkably complete fossil skeleton that paleontologists analysed indicates that this was likely a semi-aquatic dinosaur, able to both swim and to move about on land.
“This is the first dinosaur with a lifestyle similar to aquatic birds: this indicates that these dinosaurs were able to exploit an environment that was not considered in our previous interpretation of dinosaur history,” Andrea Cau, a paleontologist at the Giovanni Capellini Geological Museum of the University of Bologna and lead author of the paper, said in an email.
This finding helps establish a new subfamily of similar dinosaurs, according to the paper. Several other fossil specimens from the same region fit into this family, indicating they’re part of the same small branch on the evolutionary tree.
