Researchers in China have discovered a 125 million years old feathered ‘dragon’ dinosaur by the name of Zhenyuanlong suni. Check out the photos of the feather winged ‘dragon’ dinosaur in the gallery and read more on the story below!
The mule-sized dinosaur called Zhenyuanlong suni had a long tail and feathered wings, and once roamed a corner of what is now northeastern China. The dinosaur is a close relative the Velociraptor dinosaur. The complete skeleton of the animal shows that it once had short arms with a pattern of long feathers, which also appear to have been on the dinosaur’s tail. Stephen Brusatte, a Scotland-based paleontologist says, “The cool thing here is that it is a dinosaur that looks a lot like a bird.” The discovery has left scientists with a question. “This is the first time that we have wings found on a dinosaur this big with short arms. There’s no way it could fly,” Brusatte explains, in a phone interview with CNN. “That raises a big mystery. Why did dinosaurs evolve wings?”
A farmer first found the Zhenyuanlong fossil in China’s Liaoning province. For almost twenty years, this area of China has been known for many dinosaur discoveries. Xu Xing, a paleontologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, says that this area of China is where the first solid evidence proving dinosaurs had feathers was found in 1996. “After that first discovery, thousands of specimens, thousands of fossils from different species and different times were discovered in Liaoning,” Xu says. The region’s unique volcanic activity in the Early Cretaceous Period is said to have preserved fossils alot better than in other parts of the world.
Xu, who claims to have discovered more than 50 new species, says that Zhenyuanlong will help scientists determine how dinosaurs first began to fly. Brusatte and his co-author Junchang Lu were left speculating why a flightless, two-meter long animal would have needed wings. “It may be that such large wings comprised of multiple layers of feathers were useful for display purposes,” they wrote in an issue of the journal Scientific Reports, where the discovery was announced. The wings may have also helped the dinosaur glide for indeterminate distances. Artist Chuang Zhao worked with the scientists to create a picture of what Zhenyuanlong may have looked like. Because of growth in the funding of scientific research, China has become a key place for dinosaur hunters in recent decades. The Chinese word for dinosaur is “konglong”, which also translates as “terrifying dragon.” The dragon is an important symbol in Chinese culture.
Check out the photos of the feather winged ‘dragon’ dinosaur Zhenyuanlong in the gallery!
