奇速英语

中国辽宁发现一种新的恐龙

We may not know how it tasted, but it certainly looked like a chicken. A new species dinosaur, which had feather all over its body, the earliest known bird ancestor — was recently discovered by a team of scientists in Liaoning, China.
What they found there was a really well-preserved, 125-million-year-old fossilized skeleton of the three-foot long animal, which has been named Jianianhualong tengi. Jianianhualong tengi is a troodontid dinosaur — one of the bird-like dinosaurs that are the closest relatives to modern-day birds. One of the key features of the newly discovered dinosaur was its asymmetrical feathers, which are wider on one side than the other. This is a prime factor in the history of animal flight.
“Asymmetrical feathers have been associated with the ability of flying, but are also found in species that do not fly, and their appearance was a major event in feather evolution,”the authors write in the study. It is not clear whether Jianianhualong tengi was capable of flight. The scientists will try their best to find more evidences to tell whether the newly found species have the ability of traveling freely in the sky just like large birds.

“It is extremely challenging to accurately tell their ability of flying in early fossil birds and bird-like dinosaurs because there is a lot of missing data to deal with,” Michael Pittman, a scientist at the University of Hong Kong and an author of the study, told National Geographic. The discovery was published on Tuesday in Nature Communications, a very popular British journal.