Dinosaur Discovery Helps Solve Piece of Evolutionary Puzzle

Through an expedition to the Gobi Desert of China, scientists have solved the puzzle of how one group of dinosaurs came to look like birds. The discovery extends the fossil record of the family Alvarezsauridae - a bizarre group of bird-like dinosaurs with a large claw on the hand and very short, powerful arms--back 63 million years, further distancing the group from birds on the evolutionary tree. Until now, there was no direct evidence that dinosaurs of this type lived during the Late Jurassic, some 160 million years ago.

George Washington University (GWU) scientist Jonah Choiniere named the newly discovered species of dinosaur, called Haplocheirus sollers (meaning simple, skillful hand). "Haplocheirus is a transitional fossil, because it shows an early evolutionary step in how the bizarre hands of later alvarezsaurs evolved from earlier predatory dinosaurs," said Choiniere. "The fossil also confirms our predictions that Alvarezsauridae should have been evolving in the Late Jurassic time period."

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Image credit: Zina Deretsky, National Science Foundation