Hesperornithoides miessleri. Image credit: Gabriel Ugueto
SciNews has an article about the discovery of a new bird-like dinosaur in Wyoming. The animal, Hesperornithoides miessleri, lived about 150 million years ago, during the Jurassic period. It has been nicknamed Lori and was about the size of a chicken. Its contemporaries were giant dinosaurs like Stegaoaurus, Diplodocus, and Allosaurus. The description appeared in a paper in the Journal PeerJ.
Hesperornithoides miessleri is a highly terrestrial proto-bird, suggesting that many features scientists associate with being bird-like evolved in dinosaurs that lived out their lives on the ground.
“We found that Lori is a primitive member of a group of dinosaurs that includes Troodon, but perhaps more importantly we discovered that the smaller details of the family tree of bird-like dinosaurs isn’t quite as resolved as some researchers would claim,” said team leader Scott Hartman, a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“For example, it only takes a few changes in the dataset for Hesperornithoides miessleri to be found as a closer relative of Velociraptor than of Troodon.”
“One robust finding we did come up with is that even as the interrelationships changed, the primitive members of all these groups were non-flying ground dwelling dinosaurs.”
“That means that some small relatives of Velociraptor such as Microraptor that looks like it could have glided evolved this separately from the modern bird family.”
