WASHINGTON — Nearly 50 years ago, scientists found bones of two large dinosaur arms in Mongolia and figured they had discovered a fearsome critter with killer claws.
Now scientists have found the rest of the dinosaur and have a new description: goofy and weird.
The beast probably walked on two legs like a cross between TV dinosaur Barney and Jar Jar Binks of Star Wars fame. It was 16 feet tall and 36 feet long, weighing 7 tons, with a duckbill on its head and a humplike sail on its back.
And if that’s not enough, it ate like a giant vacuum cleaner.
That’s Deinocheirus mirificus
, which means “terrible hands that look peculiar.” It is newly reimagined after a full skeleton was found in Mongolia and described in a paper released Wednesday by the journal Nature.
About 70 million years old, it’s an ancestral relative of the modern ostrich and belongs to the dinosaur family often called ostrich dinosaurs.
