Scientists have discovered a new species of dinosaurs in the Gobi Desert, Mongolia. A dinosaur called Duonychus Tsogtbaatari holds two feet long claw fingers in each hand.
Duonychus, the Greek word for two claws, weighed about 10 feet tall and weighed about 570 pounds, belonged to a group of dinosaurs called Therizinosaurs. It featured a strange set of traits. Feathers.
They lived in Asia and North America during the Cretaceous period between 145 and 66 million years ago.
Despite having only two claws, researchers who described the specimen in a study published Tuesday in the journal Iscience said Duonychus is an “effective glasper” capable of reaching branches up to about five inches in diameter or branches of vegetation.
NBC News contacted the research team for comments.
The specimen was excavated in 2012 by researchers at the Institute of Paleontology at the Mongolian Academy of Sciences. It dates back 90 million years ago and is known for its extraordinary diversity.
The fossil was a partial skeleton without the skull and legs, but research shows that the hands were “exceptionally preserved.” Duonychus individuals were not fully mature and their nails were measured approximately 1 foot long.
Therodinosaurus were part of a flesh-eating meat spores such as tyrannosaurus and spinosaurus, but mostly ate leaves from large shrubs and trees.
It was “a great new discovery, and the two claws are interesting,” said Michael Benton, a professor of vertebrate paleontology at the University of Bristol, UK, who was not involved in the study.
Dinosaurs once had five fingers just like humans, but they quickly lost two over time, and most dinosaurs have three fingers, Benton told NBC News in an email Wednesday.
“So it was unusual for them to be two,” he said.
Benton said the number of digits has nothing to do with it being hooked or pulled. He added that the third finger was shorter in length, which could have been “intrusive.”
“It shows that dinosaurs are incredibly diverse and have diversified shapes and functions,” Benton said.
According to this study, the fossil record of Terazinosauria is “particularly abundant” in Cretaceous sediments in East Asia, particularly Mongolia and China.
The United Nations Educational and Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is known as the Gobi Desert of Mongolia and is known as the world’s largest dinosaur fossil reservoir.
