China has found the remains of a new dinosaur and they have something extraordinary: their hands

A few fossilized bones can tell a lot about the world of the past, sometimes they are enough to discover and catalog a new species of prehistoric animal. This is what just happened thanks to the remains of a dinosaur discovered in China.

From the Cretaceous to today. The newly discovered species has been cataloged under the name of migmanychion laiyang. According to the first analyses, this dinosaur would have lived about 121 million years agoduring the early Cretaceous period.

Despite the fact that only part of the remains of this animal have been found (a complete hand, some ribs, the left front limb), the researchers responsible for the discovery have located the place that this dinosaur could have had in the taxonomic tree of these animals. .

He migmanychion laiyang would belong to theropod suborder, more specifically to that of the coelurosaurs and, narrowing the circle more, to that of the manirraptors. This group shares it with its only living relatives, the birds; and with dinosaurs such as velociraptors and oviraptorosaurs.

Hands and wrists. Manirraptors would stand out for a characteristic bone on the wrist. They are also the only group of flying dinosaurs (since animals like pterosaurs were not, taxonomically speaking, dinosaurs). The hands of this fossil were decisive when cataloging it as a new species and giving it a place in the taxonomic tree.

The newly discovered dinosaur would be closely related to the Fukuivenator paradoxusthe Fukui Hunter, another early Cretaceous manirraptor whose remains were discovered a few years ago in Japan.

The details of the study carried out on the remains of this Cretaceous animal were published in an article in the magazine Cretaceous Research.

Pigeon Hill. The find was made at the archaeological site known as Pigeon Hill, in the vicinity of Baoshan, in Inner Mongolia. According to the researchers responsible for the discovery, various samples were found at the archaeological site, although part of them could not be related to the migmanychion laiyang.

The last dinosaurs. Both this dinosaur and its Japanese relative still represent a great mystery to be solved. The classifications of these prehistoric animals are based on a small number of fossil remains of animals that not only lived millions of years ago, but lived even longer.

Beyond the interest generated by dinosaurs, understanding their evolution is also relevant when it comes to better understanding where animals still present in our ecosystems such as birds, but also some reptiles, come from.

Also, in a more indirect way, the paleontological study can help us to better understand our own place in evolution, providing us with tools for analysis beyond the fossils of extinct animals hundreds of millions of years ago. We are still far from unraveling these secrets, but fossil by fossil, we are getting closer.

In Xataka | The dinosaur that had an ax for a tail

Image | Wang et al., 2023