Beaked, bird-like dinosaur tells story of finger evolution
Wednesday, June 17, 2009 - 14:28
in Paleontology & Archaeology
James Clark, the Ronald B. Weintraub Professor of Biology in The George Washington University's Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, and Xu Xing, of the Chinese Academy of Science's Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, have discovered a unique beaked, plant-eating dinosaur in China. This finding demonstrates that theropod, or bird-footed, dinosaurs were more ecologically diverse in the Jurassic period than previously thought and offers important new evidence about how the three-fingered hand of birds evolved from the hand of dinosaurs. The discovery is featured in this week's edition of the journal Nature.