Bones are of huge birdlike dinosaur
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The remains of a birdlike dinosaur as tall as the formidable Tyrannosaurus rex have been found in China, a discovery that indicates a more complicated evolutionary process for birds, scientists reported Thursday in the journal Nature.
Fossilized bones uncovered in the Erlian Basin of northern China’s Inner Mongolia region show that the specimen was about 26 feet long, 16 feet tall and 3,000 pounds, said Xu Xing, a paleontologist at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing.
But the dinosaur, Gigantoraptor erlianensis, also had a beak and slender legs and probably had feathers.
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