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

by John Pickrell

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 they began to find dinosaur and bird feathers preserved in 99-million-year-old amber in jewellery markets, they started to prospect directly at amber quarries. They have since recovered many important specimens exquisitely preserved in amber, including two feathered bird or dinosaur wings with claws...