Live Science has a post about a new dinosaur discovery in Japan. The animal is a therizinosaur and is called Paralitherizinosaurus japonicus. The genus means "reptile by the sea". The large Edward Scissorhands-like claws were probably primarily used to slash vegetation not other animals as the animal was a herbivore. P. japonicus lived about 80 million years ago during the Cretaceous Period. More details can be found in a paper published in the journal Scientific Reports.
The hook-shaped fossil, which includes a partial vertebra and a partial wrist and forefoot, was discovered by a different team of researchers in 2008; since then, it was stored in the collections at the Nakagawa Museum of Natural History in Hokkaido, Japan.
Japanese scientists found the specimen in Nakagawa, a district in Hokkaido located on the northernmost of Japan's main islands, a locale known for its rich fossil deposits. The fossil was encased in a concretion — a hardened mineral deposit — and at the time of its discovery, paleontologists said it "was believed to belong to a therizinosaur," though due to a lack of comparative data at the time, the original researchers were unable to draw any definitive conclusions, representatives of Hokkaido University said in a statement(opens in new tab).
