London, March 30 (Inditop.com) Scientists have discovered a tiny dinosaur tailor-made for running, according to a new Chinese-Canadian-British study.
The fossil skeleton of the tiny animal, named Xixianykus Zhangi, is incomplete but would probably have been half-a-metre long. The specimen comes from Xixia County in Henan province, China.
This late Cretaceous ‘road-runner’ had a number of adaptations for fast, efficient locomotion. Most strikingly, the upper leg (the femur or thigh bone) is particularly short in comparison to the lower leg and the foot — a pattern seen in many running animals today.
Other features of the hind limb, pelvis and backbone would have promoted stability and reduced superfluous, energy-wasting movements as Xixianykus dashed across prehistoric landscapes.
Corwin Sullivan, Canadian researcher and a study co-author, said: “The limb proportions of Xixianykus are among the most extreme ever recorded for a theropod dinosaur.”
“This doesn’t provide a basis for estimating its top speed, but it does show that Xixianykus was a highly efficient runner. Several other characteristics of the skeleton reinforce this impression,” he added.
Interestingly, some of these characteristics might also have played a role in another of the animal’s likely activities — digging for termites and ants.
Study co-author David Hone, a British researcher, said according to a release of the Chinese Academy of Sciences: “It may sound odd, but digging and running actually work quite well together. Some modern termite-eating species travel long distances between colonies of their prey, so as an efficient runner Xixianykus would have been able to follow this pattern.”
The study was published in Zootaxa.
