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Fossilised dinosaur footprints found in southeast China suggest that a group of birdlike raptors might have evolved to be bigger than previously believed. This would defy portrayals of the creatures in popular culture, such as the Jurassic Park films.
Two-toed dinosaur tracks measuring around 36cm (14 inches) in length were found at a site in southeast China’s Fujian province. They might have belonged to a new group of raptor dinosaurs in the troodontid clade that were about five metres (16 feet) long.
“Standing an estimated 1.8 metres (6 feet) at the hip, Fujianipus is among the largest known raptors,” the international team from China, Australia and the United States wrote in a paper published in the peer-reviewed journal iScience.
The tracks discovered in China were left by troodontids, “a much slimmer and brainier group in the Velociraptor family,” said Anthony Romilio, study author and palaeontologist at the University of Queensland Dinosaur Lab.
