Giant feathered dinosaur no pretty polly

WEIGHING more than a ton with a parrot’s beak and dagger-like claws, Gigantoraptor was far from a pretty Polly.

Scientists who discovered the feathered flesh-eating dinosaur in China were astonished by its size.

The creature, which stood on two legs, was at least twice the height of a man at the shoulder and more than 26 feet long.

At about 1,400 kilograms, or 1.3 tons, it was 35 times heavier than any other feathered dinosaur known to date.

In fact it may have been even bigger, because the specimen unearthed from the Sunitezuoqi region of Inner Mongolia was not fully grown.

Gigantoraptor was the stuff of nightmares. Although it could not fly, it was extensively covered in feathers and had short “forewings” ending in large clawed hands.

The head, which sat on an ostrich-like neck, resembled that of a bird with a powerful snapping beak in place of toothed jaws.

The dinosaur lived in the Late Cretaceous period, around 70 million years ago, at the same time that Tyrannosaurus Rex terrorised what is now North America.

Most theories suggest that carnivorous dinosaurs became smaller as they grew more bird-like. Gigantoraptor, which evolved towards the end of the dinosaurs’ reign on Earth, proved this was not always the case.

A team led by Dr Xing Xu, from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, described the find yesterday in the journal Nature.

The partial skeleton included pieces of the beak, vertebrae, limb bones, right shoulder blade and pelvis.

Because of its bird-like features Gigantoraptor was placed in the family of Oviraptorosuarids, a group of small feathered dinosaurs which rarely weigh more than 40kg.

The scientists wrote: “As an Oviraptorosaurian, Gigantoraptor is remarkable in its gigantic size.”

Bone structure patterns suggested that the dinosaur had an unusually fast growth rate, which may help explain how it got so big.