new troodontid from Mongolia

[M Murphy <4mjmu@home.com>]

This is a story from www.abcnews.com.  Comes with artist recreation +
picture of skull.

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M.J. Murphy

`The shapes of things are dumb.'
L. Wittgenstein


New Dino From Mongolia


                                                  Might Offer Clues on
                                                  Evolution of Birds

                                                  An artist?s conception
of what
                                                  Byronosaurus jaffei
looked like. The
                                                  small dinosaur, which
lived in Mongolia,
                                                  may have shared a
common ancestor
                                                  with birds. (Sean
Murtha/AMNH)




                 By Kenneth Chang

                 March 15 ? They were about 5-feet-long, agile
                 hunters with big eyes and big brains ? big for a
                 dinosaur, anyway. About 80 million years ago,
                 two were entombed in Mongolian sand dunes.
                                               Scientists from the
                                          American Museum of
                                          Natural History in New
                                          York City and George
                                          Washington University
                                          in Washington, D.C. are
                                          reporting that and more
                                          about a new dinosaur in
                                          the latest issue of the
                                          Journal of Vertebrate
                                          Paleontology. One of
                                          the dino specimens was
                                          found in 1993 at Ukhaa
                                          Tolgod, a rich deposit
                                          of fossils in southern
                                          Mongolia. A second
                                          was unearthed nearby
                 three years later.
                      ?It?s a small animal, about the size of me,? says
5? 10?
                 Mark Norrell, curator and chair of division of
                 paleontology at the museum and lead author of the
article.
                 ?It was an extremely lightly built and agile animal.?
                      The new species, dubbed Byronosaurus jaffei,
                 belongs to a group of dinosaurs known as troodontids,
                 which are generally believed to be close relatives of
                 modern-day birds. How close ? and whether birds
                 descended from troodontids ? has been difficult to
                 determine, because paleontologists only know of eight
                 troodontids species, including B. jaffei. ?These are
                 exceptionally rare animals,? Norrell says.

                 The skull of Byronosaurus jaffei. (Mick Ellison/AMNH)


                 Younger Relative
                 B. jaffei itself cannot be an ancestor of birds, which
                 evolved some 70 million years earlier, but could have
                 shared a common ancestor with them. ?We?ve known so
                 little about troodontids that it?s difficult to
decipher,? says
                 Catherine Forster, a paleontologist at the State
University
                 of New York at Stony Brook.
                      Unlike other troodontids, the new dinosaur
possesses
                 two birdlike features: teeth that lack steak-knife-like

                 serrations and a chamber in the snout where air enters
                 from the nostrils before passing through to the mouth.
                      Among dinosaurs, troodontids also had large brains

                 relative to their size, approaching the brain-to-size
ratio of
                 birds.
                      The newest fossil and the promise of finding more
                 troodontids in the sands of Mongolia ?is a very
important
                 factor in deciphering where birds come from,? Forster
                 says.



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