Imagine Big Bird with an attitude — a real bad attitude.
Instead of his friendly yellow hands, this one-ton character has monstrous, bladed claws. The beast has an intimidating name as well: it is a Therizinosaurid dinosaur, probably related to one discovered in New Mexico called Nothronychus mckinleyi.
The discovery was the subject of a report Tuesday during the meeting of the Rocky Mountain Section of the Geological Society of America at Southern Utah State University, Cedar City. The fossil was found in Kane County by a team headed by a former Utah state paleontologist, David D. Gillette, now with the Museum of Northern Arizona, Flagstaff.
The fossil dates to the late Cretaceous era, around 65 million years ago when the dinosaurs died out. Located immediately south of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, the deposit is a marine formation.
Until now, the shale deposit has not yielded fossils of land animals, according to the researchers.
"The skeleton consists of one front limb including most of the manus (the end of the arm), complete pelvis, both rear limbs" plus vertebra and the sacrum, says an abstract of Gillette's report. Other authors are L. Barry Albright and Merle H. Graffam of the museum and Alan L. Titus of the national monument staff.
None of the skull has been discovered. The skeleton seems related to the New Mexico dinosaur, but is at least a million years younger. That means they are probably different species if not different genera.
Also during the meeting, Gillette's group reported on the finding of skin impressions of a Hadrosaur, a duck-billed dinosaur, found in the monument. The skin designs are preserved in "exceptional detail," they reported.
Scott Sampson, paleontologist at the Utah Museum of Natural History (University of Utah campus), reported on the discovery of two new horned dinosaurs. The ceratopsids found in the monument included partial skulls.
In a "bone bed" of hadrosaur fossils, Sampson's team also found the skull dome of a pachycephalosaur (a large herbivore with a beaked mouth and bumps on its head) and osteoderms, or bony skin fragments, of a giant crocodile.
Reporting on the Sampson group discoveries were Mark A. Lowen, Terry A. Gates and Lindsay E. Zanno of the Utah Museum of Natural History, and James I. Kirkland, the current Utah state paleontologist.
The section's meeting concludes Thursday. Among the topics of the meeting today are landslide hazards in Utah.
E-mail: bau@desnews.com