Weird Dinosaurs: The Strange New Fossils Challenging Everything We Thought We Knew

by John Pickrell

The Shandong Tianyu Museum of Nature in Pingyi, China, is the place to go if you want to experience China’s dinosaurs in all their weird and wonderful glory. Five hundred kilometres south-east of Beijing, it’s the largest museum of its kind in the world, with fossils of more than 1000 complete dinosaurs, 2300 early birds and plenty of creatures that bridge the boundary between the two groups. Arranged in 28 halls in three nondescript-looking buildings, these numerous spectacular specimens merely hint at the treasures behind closed doors, where a backlog of new feathered dinosaur finds is stacked up waiting to be studied and named.

The weird wonders that will follow The majority of China’s feathered dinosaurs have come from western Liaoning’s Yixian and Jiufotang formations – layers of rock containing a single evolving community of plants and animals known as the Jehol Biota. This dates from the Early Cretaceous period 120–125 million years ago. Yi qi instead comes from the Yanliao or Daohugou Biota and the Tiaojishan Formation of rocks from Hebei, Liaoning and Inner Mongolia. The type of preservation and incredible fossils are similar to those of Jehol, but the rocks here are about 30 million years older, from around 153–165 million years ago during the Mid- to Late Jurassic.15 These rocks were also the source of Anchiornis, Xiaotingia, the other scansoriopterygids Epidexipteryx and Epidendrosaurus; a few other very bird-like feathered dinosaurs; and also pterosaurs, amphibians, lizards and mammals. Furthermore, because of the geographic overlap with Jehol and the fact that the fossils here are tens of millions of years older, palaeontologists have a very unusual opportunity to study changes in the make-up of the community over time and during a key period of dinosaur and bird evolution. And it’s very likely that exciting new finds are yet to come from the Yanliao Biota. Sullivan is betting on a string of strange species in the next few decades. ‘Some of them I would expect to be every bit as weird as Yi qi. We’re seeing a side of the Jurassic we’ve never had access to before, and I’m sure there are...

These really were strange dwarf dinosaurs, as had first been predicted a century before by visionary man of science and Transylvanian aristocrat Franz Baron Nopcsa von Felső-Szilvás, who found the first of these dinosaurs on his family estate in the 1890s. Nopcsa rode a motorbike, was a spy in various Balkan states in the years preceding and during World War I, was briefly considered for the throne of the nascent kingdom of Albania, and eventually killed himself and his long-time secretary and boyfriend Bajazid Doda in double murder–suicide in 1933, just a few months after Adolf Hitler swept to power as chancellor of Germany. Nopcsa was conspicuously ahead of his time, and theorised many concepts we take for granted today: he deduced that birds evolved from dinosaurs, that some dinosaurs and pterosaurs were warm-blooded, that Transylvania was then an island, and even that plate tectonics explained puzzling patterns in the fossil record. Belgian palaeobiologist Louis Dollo described him as a ‘a comet racing across our palaeontological skies, spreading but a diffuse sort of light’.2 Nopcsa was a legendary dinosaur hunter on a par with the late-1800s US palaeontologists Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles March, of ‘Bone Wars’ fame.3 Despite this, he was derided by some of his contemporaries, and remains very little known today.

He adds that some of the things declared as new species are probably ‘chrono-species’, meaning they are the same animals evolving in body shape over time.

At the time of writing, the globe-trotting fossil was being prepared in Korea, but the eventual plan is for the entire specimen to be displayed in Ulaanbaatar’s Central Museum of Mongolian Dinosaurs, which is currently under construction.

Nomina nuda (singular ‘nomen nudem’) means ‘naked names’ and is used to refer to Latin species names that have failed to stick because the species were inadequately described in the initial publication, with too little information to distinguish them from other named species. In their paper, the RAS scientists, with their limited collection of specimens, claimed the fossils represented remains from several species, while Godefroit’s team said there was only one. A subsequent paper, published by Alifanov and Saveliev in 2015,8 claimed a third species, an ovimimosaur, from the site, but other palaeontologists pointed out that this fossil of a supposed hand bore a remarkable similarity to the foot of the Kulindadromeus specimens still housed at INREC in Chita.

The size of the carnivorous dinosaurs from Alaska is puzzling. While Nanuqsaurus is smaller than its relatives, another theropod found there, Troodon, appears to be larger than its southern relatives. There is a loose biological trend called Bergmann’s Rule whereby many animals are larger in populations closer to the poles. But not everything follows this trend, Fiorillo says, pointing to grizzly bears in Alaska, which tend to vary in size based more on where they can exploit salmon as a food resource.

The large size of Troodon’s eyes may have meant that in the Arctic it was able to outcompete other kinds of predator that were more common elsewhere. Fiorillo points to modern ecosystems where wolves and coyotes once co-existed but the wolf has been removed. ‘The coyote’s response is that they grow bigger. The top predator is removed, so they can expand into their niche space. There’s a modern basis for saying that’s what we are also seeing in Troodon.’

Some features of the bones of the Naze theropod and others from the peninsula hint that these dinosaurs were relatively primitive for their time. Some believe the Cretaceous dinosaurs of Antarctica represent a kind of relict fauna, consisting of groups more commonly associated with earlier times elsewhere on earth. One theory to explain this is that the newly successful flowering plants – the angiosperms – were slower to colonise Antarctica than other continents, perhaps because it was cloaked in total darkness for so many months each year. In the Late Cretaceous, Antarctica was still smothered with the cycads, palms and ginkgoes that elsewhere dominated during the Jurassic Period, and this may explain why more ancient types of dinosaur persisted there.

‘We can start to see how they were differentiating in the Early and Middle Jurassic and can address how Antarctica started to become this really unique place, climatically, geographically and biologically.’ Antarctic dinosaurs may have been different in ways that scientists don’t yet understand. For example, some Australian dinosaurs from far southerly latitudes appear to have had large eyes and optic nerves – such as the small ornithopod Leaellynasaura – useful in a nocturnal habitat. Did some of them hibernate? Studies of growth lines in fossil bones from southern Australia so far seem to suggest these polar dinosaurs grew consistently throughout the year, but nobody knows for sure.15

We’ve covered plenty of weird dinosaurs and a lot of ground – from the Arctic to the Antarctic and Australia to Eastern Europe; and from implausible winged monsters and shaggy, pot-bellied enigmas to hump-backed filter-feeding curiosities and creatures decked out in an extravagance of feathers. But there’s so much more I was unable to include. These are both new discoveries in regions with an existing history of palaeontological work and also new places with dinosaur-bearing deposits that have yet to be properly prospected. Just a few of the new locations with enormous potential are Greenland, Myanmar, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tunisia, Malawi and Niger. For example, Michael Ryan at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History has found dinosaur footprints in Greenland and believes the island has great potential for further discovery if funding and local government support can be secured. That could give a whole new dinosaur fauna from a largely unexplored part of the world. Other regions, such as Tunisia and Algeria, are likely to be as rich in fossils as neighbouring Morocco. Federico Fanti, of the University of Bologna in Italy, has been digging fossils in Tunisia, but political instability there and in Algeria means they are currently unsafe places for Western scientists to work. With wealth and development, many parts of the world currently

inaccessible to foreign fossil hunters may open up in the future.

Stephen Brusatte and Hans-Dieter Sues are some of the palaeontologists who have been working in Central Asia, where a series of former Soviet nations have almost as much potential as Mongolia to yield huge numbers of new dinosaur fossils. A 90-million-year-old horse-sized tyrannosaur from the Kyzylkum Desert of northern Uzbekistan was named as Timurlengia euotica (after a 14th-century Central Asian warlord) in early 2016.1 It helped fill a 20-million-year gap in the fossil record that was obscuring the origins of T. rex itself, and the fossil included a brain case that showed the species had a relatively large brain with an elongated ear canal that helped it hear low-frequency sounds. Our knowledge of the tyrannosaur lineage has expanded enormously in recent years, with discoveries of new species right across Asia. Neighbouring Kazakhstan has recently yielded part of the upper jaw of a huge tyrannosaur, replete with numerous teeth. Myanmar has also produced some truly breathtaking new specimens. Here, a team led by Xing Lida of the China University of Geosciences in Beijing has been searching for fossils in the Hukawng Valley in the northern state of Kachin. In late 2014, after ...

every year. New finds are also coming from Western Europe, particular...

Several exciting new finds have been made in the United Kingdom in recent years. Following spring storms in early 2014, brothers and amateur fossil hunters Nick and Rob Hanigan made a thrilling find on Lavernock beach in the Vale of Glamorgan, southern Wales. Following the collapse of some cliffs, a series of blocks with unusual bones had been exposed. Hours of work yielded five slabs of rock with animal bones, which the pair carried back to their car. They spent almost a year ca...

The species was described as Dracoraptor by a team including Dave Martill in 2016, and at 200 million years old may be the earliest Jurassic dinosaur known in the world.2 Dracoraptor was an agile carnivore, 2 metres long with a long tail and just half a metre tall. Related to a small North American dinosaur called Coelophysis, it likely fed upon insects and small mammals and reptiles. It is only the second dinosaur ever found in Wales, and the nation’s first carnivore. Dinosaurs were evolving rapidly in the early Jurassic, forming some of the major groups, but there are few specimens from this time worldwide, so the new fossil could help answer important questions. From the opposite end of the United Kingdom, on Scotland’s remote Isle of Skye come hundreds of dinosaur footprints, trackways left along the shore of a brackish lagoon by sauropods 161 million years ago in the Middle Jurassic. Described in 2015 by a team led by Brusatte of the University of Edinburgh, it is not only the largest dinosaur sit...

many tracks crossing each other that it looks like a dinosaur disco...

Massospondylus from South Africa was one of the very first dinosaurs named, by Richard Owen at the Natural History Museum in London in 1854. But South Africa is a location where many new Early Jurassic discoveries are now being made, the work spearheaded by Jonah Choiniere at the Evolutionary Studies Institute of the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. These include 10 nests of possible Massospondylus eggs found in a cliff at the Golden Gate Highlands National Park of the eastern Free State, which, at 190 million years old, may be the oldest dinosaur nests ever found.4 In 2015, a new sauropodomorph dinosaur, a relative of Massospondylus, was named Sefapanosaurus (meaning ‘cross lizard’, in reference to the shape of its ankle, in the Sesotho language of Zastron region in which it was found).5 Further north in Africa, in Tanzania, a giant titanosaur sauropod called Rukwatitan bisepultus was described by palaeontologists including Ohio University’s Eric Gorscak in 2015.6 The finding added to the handful of titanosaurs found so far on the African mainland. ‘Much of what we know regarding titanosaurian evolutionary history stems from numerous discoveries in South America – a continent that underwent a steady separation from Africa during the first half of the Cretaceous Period’, Gorscak told reporters. ‘With the discovery of Rukwatitan and study of the material in nearby Malawi, we are beginning to fill a significant gap from a large part of the world.’