Scientists Announce New Dinosaur Discovery Species Dubbed 'chicken from Hell' (Anzu wyliei)

Archaeologists have unearthed a strange bird-like dinosaur dating back more than 66 million years.

Known as Anzu wyliei, the species would have resembled something of a cross between a bird and a reptile with its beak-like head, bony crest and a long lizard-like tail. A US team discovered definitive evidence of the creature in the form of fossils unearthed at sites in North and South Dakota.

"Anzu is really bizarre, even by dinosaur standards," said palaeontologist Hans Sues. "The skull has this extraordinarily tall and thin crest with a snout and a huge beak with sharp edges and a strange sliding jaw joint."

Its appearance, combined with the fact that some of the fossils were found at a location known as Hell Creek, lead researchers to nickname it "the chicken from Hell".

The four scientists who helped discover the new species published a paper on the "Chicken from Hell" in the PLOS Journal on Wednesday.

The dinosaur was five feet tall and eleven feet long, with a very long tail and feathers on the arms, according to the Smithsonian. It lived at the end of the Cretaceous period -- from about 68 million to 66 million years ago.

"This group of dinosaurs looks really bizarre even by dinosaurian standards," Hans-Dieter Sues, one of the paleontologists who wrote the paper on the new species, told the Washington Post.

"We had inklings that there might be such a creature out there, but now with these bones we have 80% of the skeleton and can really look in detail at the structure of this animal and make inferences about its biology," said Sues.

Bones in ground:

But there's no magic formula for discovery, according to Tyler Lyson, who found one of the Anzu skeletons in 2009 on his uncle's ranch in North Dakota.

"We were just walking along when we saw some dinosaur bones poking out of the ground," he recalls.

"I knew right away that they belonged to a meat-eating dinosaur because meat-eating dinosaurs have hollow bones, and these bones were hollow. We carefully made a plaster jacket to wrap the specimen and get it back to the lab. After several hours cleaning it, we knew we had found something new. It was unlike anything else we had ever seen before."

Dr Lyson is part of the Smithsonian team and the founder of the Marmarth Research Foundation, which promotes the study of fossils. He discovered his first dinosaur bone when he was just six years old. The other two Anzu skeletons, which include a skull, were discovered by private collectors.

"You just have to spend time out there," he says. "The bones come to the surface and then break up into little pieces. You get a trail of broken bits of bone which you follow, and if you're lucky you'll see bones sticking out of the side of the hill - and that's exactly what we found here."

Although the Anzu skeletons were discovered several years ago, scientists work in "deep time", says Dr Lyson. Bones have to be catalogued and compared with other specimens while scientific evidence has to be peer-reviewed. It can take a decade before any official announcement is made.

This is a mounted replica skeleton of the new oviraptorosaurian dinosaur species Anzu wyliei on display in the Dinosaurs in Their Time exhibition at Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Pittsburgh, Pa., USA. Credit: Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

This image shows the skeleton and selected bones of the new oviraptorosaurian dinosaur species Anzu wyliei. Credit: Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

All three Anzu skeletons are housed at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, which collaborated with the Smithsonian to identify the new species.

Source: BBC News