Word: mononychus
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Dates: during 1993-1993
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Surprises crop up constantly. The latest: a new species from Mongolia, announced last week by Norell and several U.S. and Mongolian scientists. Known as Mononychus (meaning one claw), the turkey-size animal looked like a modern, flightless bird, complete with feathers, but had bone structures characteristic of both birds and dinosaurs. Its discovery cements the bird- dinosaur link even more firmly...
...comes Mononychus, one of the fruits of the first Western expeditions into the Mongolian Gobi in 60 years. "Central Asia probably has the greatest dinosaur-yielding potential of any area in the world," says Michael Novacek, dean of science at the American Museum of Natural History, who went to the Gobi in 1990 and has returned every year since. "There are areas the size of Montana that haven't even been prospected. You could spend a whole lifetime there...
...Mononychus may be the discovery of a lifetime. The turkey-size predator, ! with its mouthful of sharp teeth and long tail, looked quite similar to the theropods. Even so, says paleontologist Mark Norell, it shares a number of features with modern birds. "In Archaeopteryx, for example," he explains, "the fibula ((the thin bone in the leg)) touches the ankle. In birds that doesn't happen, and the same is true of Mononychus. Birds have a keeled sternum ((or breastbone)), where the flight muscles attach. Mononychus also had a keeled sternum." Some of Mononychus' wristbones were fused together, which is another...
There are researchers skeptical, of course, about how Mononychus is labeled and about the larger question of how dinosaurs are related to birds. But since scientists cannot really decide for sure whether Mononychus should be considered a primitive flightless bird or a dinosaur, it seems plausible that there is really no essential distinction: it was both...
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