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back to article Giant bird-lizard unearthed in China

Paleontologists have unearthed a T-Rex-sized "bird dinosaur", dubbed Gigantoraptor erlianensis. The beast, which lived 65 million years ago, stood five metres tall, was eight metres long, and would have weighed in at around 1.5 tonnes. The fossils were dug out of the Gobi desert's Erlian basin by Xing Xu, a paleontologist with …

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  1. Tom Cooke

    Wow!

    This is an amazing creature! Pity there won't be any DNA so they can work out how this fits together with modern eagles and hawks..........

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  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Shadow me with spirit love

    I think this story would benefit from a more holistic treatment. It can be linked to several recent news stories which have appeared on The Register. It includes is a Chinese man whose name is presumably shared with hundreds of thousands of other Chinese people; there is the potential for a Google Earth view of the location, perhaps with such a high resolution that we can see the fossil being dug out; and there is the potential for a tie-in with UAVs, which are modern-day winged predators. Eventually The Register will have honed its news into one single story per day which will cover all of the above plus some IT news, transcriptions of rude technical support people, and some local interest news for British readers. It will be a concentrated news blast.

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  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    confusing ?

    "It had a herbivore's small head and long neck, but also possessed sharp talons, more common among carnivores. Its toothless beak would have been well suited for tearing into flesh, just as hawks and other hunting birds do today."

    How is this confusing ?

    Most scavengers have long necks and small heads so that they can reach inside the carcass. And I recall a recent study that posited that actually, T-Rex was a scavenger rather than a hunter.

    So this could be just what it appears to be - a large beaked scavenger.

    Plus having a beak doesn't neccessarily make it a "bird". Turtles have beaks too ....

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  4. Adrian

    That would be a Dragon then

    ...did it breathe fire too?!

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  5. Paul Anderson

    Are You Sure It's a New Discovery ?

    I'm sure I've seen this one before:

    http://www.breatheinfo.com/images/big_bird.jpg

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  6. Nordrick Framelhammer

    Now we know what happened to Dave Lister, Kryten and Kristine Kochanski

    They obviously got transported back in time and space to earth and obviouslt bought Pete with them.

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  7. Ishkandar

    Paraphrase

    Despise not the poor sparrow but rather, pity it, when it says that its ancestor was a dinosaur for that's all that it's got left !!

    Also applies to humans quite readily !!

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  8. Adrian

    Heard it all before

    The Chinese seem to like 'finding' new species - didn't they find a dinosaur bird before which when checked was just a collection of parts from other dinosaurs ?

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