The base of Dineobellator’s tail was also unusually dexterous, perhaps allowing it to dodge and weave with the movements of its prey, similar to cheetahs on today’s African savanna. “It represents our steady progress in understanding that small dinosaurs may have been more common than large forms like the contemporary T. “The new animal Dineobellator confirms that there is a greater diversity of raptors at the end of the Cretaceous than has been suspected up until now,” said Philip Currie, a paleontologist at the University of Alberta in Canada, who was not involved with the study. This pint-size predator is the third known North American dromaeosaurid from the dinosaurs’ twilight period, and suggests that beasts of its stature may have been abundant at that time. They named the animal Dineobellator notohesperus, describing it Thursday in Scientific Reports. Jasinski and his colleagues have now confirmed that the claw - along with 20 other fossils - represents a new species that lived some 68 to 70 million years ago, just a few million years before an asteroid doomed most dinosaurs. The relic turned out to be the claw of a dromaeosaurid, a dinosaur popularly known as a raptor after its starring role in “Jurassic Park.” After more than a decade of field work and research, Dr. “We knew that it was something interesting right away,” said Steven Jasinski, a paleontologist at the State Museum of Pennsylvania, whose colleague, Robert Sullivan, first spotted the fossil.
One day in 2008, a lethal weapon from a bygone era spilled out of a hillside in New Mexico.