LiveScience has a story about a new species of carnivorous dinosaur. This new animal is called Dineobellator notohesperus and is a cousin to Velociraptors. It lived about 70 million years ago in what is now New Mexico. This particular specimen has a couple injuries, a nasty rib injury and a gash on its sickle-shaped claw, both of which show signs of healing. Read all about it in paper in the journal Scientific Reports.
The dinosaur's fossils were discovered in the San Juan Basin of northwestern New Mexico during the summer of 2008. Given the dinosaur's impressive injuries, the scientists named it Dineobellator notohesperus (pronounced "dih NAY oh - BELL a tor" "Noh toh - hes per us"), by combining the Navajo word "Diné" (Navajo people) with the Latin word "bellator" (warrior). Its species name comes from "noto" and "hesper," the Greek words for "south" and "west," respectively, in reference to the American Southwest.
D. notohesperus belongs to the dromaeosaurid family, a group of small to medium-size feathered carnivores, including Velociraptor, that lived during the Cretaceous period (145 million to 65 million years ago). After analyzing the bones, paleontologists determined that D. notohesperus would have measured about 6.5 feet (2 meters) long, about 3 feet (1 m) tall at the hip and weighed about 40-50 lbs. (18-22 kilograms), making it about as heavy as a female poodle. Remarkably, features on its forearm revealed that D. notohesperus is "one of the rare dinosaurs from North America that shows evidence of feathers," Jasinski said.
