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A fossil bed in northwestern China is littered with the remains of hundreds of prehistoric birds—including some whose broken bones were crushed into pellets, similar to those coughed up by modern owls. For years, scientists guessed that a larger predatory animal must have hunted these ancient birds, but they never found direct fossil evidence of this predator. But in a new paper published in the Annals of Carnegie Museum, researchers announced the discovery of a new species of dinosaur from this fossil bed—a cousin of Velociraptor with long feathers on its front and back limbs. Based on the dinosaur’s distinctive arm and shoulder bones, scientists hypothesize that this animal is the missing predator.
“Scientists have found these weird, broken-up clusters of bird bones at this site, and we didn’t know what made them. This new microraptor dinosaur, Jian changmaensis, is our best guess,” says Jingmai O’Connor, the associate curator of fossil reptiles at the Field Museum in Chicago and senior author of the paper describing the new species. “It’s the only dinosaur found at this site that wasn’t a bird, it was a carnivore, and it was much bigger than everything else that we’ve found there.”
