An Australian palaeontologist has discovered a new species of dinosaur in the northwestern region of the Canadian province of Alberta. Dubbed the Boreonykus, this clawed dinosaur would have been around two meters long and the height of a dog.
The remains were unearthed at Pipestone Creek, a vast Pachyrhinosaurus gravesite that can be dated back 73 million years. The extant pieces of the Boreonykus skeleton were located among thousands of bones belonging to the body of another dinosaur.
"The bones we have show [that] it would have had big hand and foot claws, a real killing claw," Phil Bell, lecturer at the School of Environmental and Rural Science at the University of New England in Australia and co-leader of the Northern Alberta Dinosaur Project, explained about his discovery. "The claws would have been used to hunt down prey. We have a handful of teeth that are like serrated steak knives."
"These would have been pretty savage predators," he added, also noting that the Boreonykus was related to the Velociraptor, a species that was made notorious by the "Jurassic Park" films.
In a recent research report, Bell outlines that the new findings shed light on an era when most of the western interior of Canada and the U.S. was covered by the Bearpaw Sea, providing insight into how raptors moved and adjusted to their environments.
"Its closest ancestors were from Mongolia," he outlined, "so this species probably crossed the land bridge from northern Asia to North America."
The first Boreonykus bones were disinterred in 1988 and were left to gather dust for 25 years, unstudied, in an Albertan museum. Then in 2012, Bell and his team began to unearth more bones from the same spot, which generated more interest, especially when the skull bone was discovered, because it solidified what type of creature it actually was.
"Although we don't have the whole skeleton, we know, based on parts of the skeleton, that it belonged to this type of dinosaur," Bell explained. Additionally, "the raptors' skin was probably feathered to keep them warm in the cold, dark winters in north Canada."
The study was published recently in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
