Life reconstruction of Diuqin lechiguanae. Image credit: Porfiri et al., doi: 10.1186/s12862-024-02247-w.
SciNews has a story about the discovery of a bird-like dinosaur in Argentina. Its name is Diuqin lechiguanae and it lived about between 86 and 84 million years ago. It belongs to the subfamily Unenlagiine, which is a family of theropods in Dromaeosauridae. The animal was found in the Bajo de la Carpa Formation in Patagonia. A paper in the journal BMC Ecology and Evolution has all the details.
“Unenlagiines are Gondwanan predatory dinosaurs that are nested within Paraves, the clade that includes birds and their closest non-avian theropod relatives,” said Dr. Juan Porfiri from the Universidad Nacional del Comahue, Buenos Aires, and his colleagues.
“The unenlagiine fossil record comes predominantly from Argentina, where the greatest number of specimens and the most complete skeletons have been found, although other materials at least tentatively assigned to Unenlagiinae have also been recovered from Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Antarctica.”
“The small-bodied, potentially volant Madagascan theropod Rahonavis ostromi has also been frequently regarded as an unenlagiine, depending on the specific phylogenetic hypothesis employed.”
