Ridiculous-looking dinosaur resembled duck, crocodile, swan and penguin
Mongolian fossil was so absurd that expert initially assumed it was a fake, before proving otherwise
With a bill like a duck but teeth like a crocodile, a swanlike neck and lethal claws, a newly identified dinosaur species looks like something Dr Seuss dreamed up.
It also had flippers like a penguin, and while it walked like an ostrich it could also swim. It is the first time swimming ability has been identified in a two-legged, meat-eating dinosaur.
The tiny creature, only about 45cm tall, roamed 75 million years ago in what is now Mongolia. Its full curled-up skeleton was found in a sandstone rock.
“It’s such a peculiar animal,” said Dennis Voeten, a palaeontology researcher at Palacky University in the Czech Republic. “It combines different parts we knew from other groups into this one small animal.”
Assuming it was a fake instead of starting assuming that the fossil is genuine was the most appropriate way to start the investigation of such a bizarre fossil
Palaeontologist Kristi Curry Rogers of Macalester College in St Paul, Minnesota, who didn’t participate in the study, called it “a pretty crazy chimera: a swan neck and dinosaur body, but with a mouthful of tiny teeth and hands and feet that look like they might be good for swimming.”