‘Kind of a bizarre one:’ New dinosaur part penguin, part duck, part swan
EDMONTON — It had feathers and looked as if it were part penguin, part duck and part swan. It was between the size of a chicken and a turkey and ate the same sorts of things in the same sorts of places as a heron.
But it was a dinosaur.
“This is kind of a bizarre one,” said University of Alberta paleontologist Philip Currie, who introduced his new feathered friend Wednesday in the journal Nature.
Halszkaraptor escuilliei (let’s call it Halzie) is a member of the same dinosaur family as the famous raptors from “Jurassic Park,” but wouldn’t have been chasing any human-sized prey through the wetlands and swamps of the late Cretaceous era.