Dino Looked Like 7-Foot Turkey

The fleshed-out rendering by artist Michael Skrepnick best represents what the new dinosaur, called Hagryphus, looked like. Image copyright Michael W. Skrepnick

SALT LAKE CITY (AP)—Fossils found in southern Utah five years ago are a new dinosaur that resembled a brightly colored, 7-foot tall turkey which could run at speeds up to 25 mph when it roamed the Earth about 75 million years ago, paleontologists said Tuesday.

Fossils of the meat-eater's hand-like claw and foot were found in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument near the Arizona border, giving scientists reason to believe the raptor group once roamed from Canada to northern New Mexico.

Scientists are calling the dinosaur Hagryphus giganteus, or giant four-footed, birdlike god of the Western desert. Much smaller variations of this dinosaur had only been found in Montana, South Dakota and the Canadian province of Alberta.

Finding the fossils in southern Utah doubles the range that this group of raptors was thought to have inhabited and almost assures that similar discoveries will be made in Colorado, Idaho and Wyoming, said Lindsay Zanno, a doctoral student at the University of Utah, who named the dinosaur. Discoveries like this don't happen every day, she said.

"This is the southernmost occurrence of this group, and it's about two times the size of the ones up north,'' Zanno said.

The birdlike dinosaur had a strong toothless beak, powerful arms and formidable claws that made it capable of eating animals and plants. Large feathers grew on the back end of the dinosaur after it lost its tail, giving it a resemblance to a turkey, Zanno said.

Scientists aren't sure what purpose the feathers served, but it wasn't for flying.

"It's quite different from modern birds,'' she said.

The discovery is the first new dinosaur to be named from Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, although others are expected within months.

The bones were discovered in 2001 as part of a collaborative project between the monument and the University of Utah.

"This is the last great, unexplored dinosaur boneyard in the lower 48 states,'' said Scott Sampson, chief curator of the Utah Museum of Natural History.

It typically takes several years to excavate, study and publish scientific findings about a new dinosaur, said Mike Getty, collections manager at the university's Utah Museum of Natural History. Getty discovered the fossils during a field expedition to the monument.

The dinosaur was named in a paper by Zanno and Sampson published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology in December.

Three other dinosaurs discovered at the national monument are expected to be named soon, Sampson said. Those include a meat-eating tyrannosaur, a horned dinosaur and a duckbilled dinosaur with a head that is 7 feet long.

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