Mongolian duck-like dinosaur fossil to return home - News.MN

Mongolian duck-like dinosaur fossil to return home

Old News! Published on: 2017.12.07

Mongolian duck-like dinosaur fossil to return home

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Л.Энх-Оргил
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A remarkable fossil from the final age of the dinosaurs70 million years ago, smuggled from Mongolia is being studied in Belgium. It is of a creature which roamed Earth’s ancient wetlands and may have looked like a duck and hunted like a duck—but was really a dinosaur related to Velociraptor.

Based on a nearly complete skeleton still embedded in rock, ‘Halszkaraptor escuilliei’ is an unusually amphibious theropod that lived in what is now Mongolia during the late Cretaceous.

The giant fish-eating theropod Spinosaurus (meaning Spine Lizard), first discovered in 1912 in Egypt, was a wetland dinosaur of the Cretaceous, known to have spent most of its time in the water. By contrast, the Mongolian Halszkaraptor’s strong hind limbs suggest that it had no problem walking on land for extended periods.

After millions of years entombed in rock, the fossil was dug up by poachers sometime in the recent past, probably from the Djadokhta Formation in southern Mongolia. The poachers smuggled it out of the country, likely sending it through China to the fossil markets of Europe.

Mongolia is the source of more than five percent of all known dinosaur species, and the country has long outlawed fossil exports. But that law has been tough to enforce, in part due to Mongolia’s size and its remote dig sites. For decades, poachers have fueled a top-dollar collector’s market, often ruining finds for paleontologists. For now, the fossil resides in Belgium; once researchers have studied it, it will be returned to Mongolia.

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