A new species of giant bird like dinosaur which used to live in enormous nests were found in China.
Scientist say that the bird like dinosaur named as Beibeilong saneness or baby dragon from China, measured about eight metres and weighed three tonnes. It lived during the Cretaceous Period, about 90 million years ago.
The giant oviraptorosaur, a type of feathered, wing- bearing, beaked dinosaur closely related to birds is the largest known dinosaur to have sat on its nest and cared for its young, researchers said.
The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, found the dinosaur species based on a number of large eggs and an associated embryo that were collected in China in the early 1990s but then exported out of the country.
Darla Zelenitsky, a Canadian palaeontologist who co-authored the study, said that that the dinosaur would have looked like an “overgrown cassowary,” a flightless bird similar to an emu.
They were likely covered in feathers, had robust, toothless beaks and often sported a crest on the top of their heads.
“It has been a big mystery for many years as to which species laid the largest-known dinosaur eggs,” Zelenitsky said.
“The identification of the baby skeleton in this study revealed that these eggs were laid by giant oviraptorosaurs, a group of dinosaurs that are very poorly known from fossil bones.
The eggs of this new species are abundant in the late Cretaceous fossil record, in Asia and North America, suggesting that giant oviraptorosaurs were common at that time.
The researchers were a joint Canadian-Chinese team led by Hanyong Pu of the Henan Geological Museum.
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