Thursday, February 24, 2005

This Week in Nature: New Cretaceous Raptor

New evidence on deinonychosaurian dinosaurs from the Late Cretaceous of Patagonia
FERNANDO E. NOVAS AND DIEGO POL
Nature 433, 858 - 861 (24 February 2005)

Novas and Poh report on the discovery of a new, Late Cretaceous maniraptoran, Neuquenraptor argentinus gen. et sp. nov. The presence of this deinonychosaurian theropod in the Southern Hemisphere shows that the Cretaceous theropod faunas from the southern continents (South America and Africa) shared greater similarity with those of the northern landmasses than previously thought, and suggests that deinonychosaurians were probably distributed worldwide at least by the beginning of the Cretaceous period. Read more about the new dinosaur here at BBC News.