A doctoral student at Oklahoma State University discovered an entirely new type of dinosaur in a surprising place: the eBay auction site.
We enlisted the help of Forefront to bring the details.
In 2020, unable to find the bones needed to complete a university research project, Kyle Atkins-Waltman purchased four fossilized bones online for $5,000.
The seller claimed that these were hind leg bones from a species of dinosaur called Anzu wyliei, known as "the chicken from hell", due to the appearance of the giant chicken and the fact that it was a carnivore.
However, after scanning the bones, the student discovered that they did not match any known species.
After a detailed examination, Atkins-Waltman identified the fossils as relatives of the "hen from hell", although there are several distinct differences between them.
He named the new species he discovered Eoneophron infernalis, a name that incorporates a reference to being earlier than "the chicken from hell" by including the Greek word "eos" ("dawn"), the name of an Egyptian falcon nicknamed the "hen of Pharaoh" - which connected the nickname "the chicken from hell" ” to Atkins-Waltman's recently deceased lizard, Pharaoh.
Infernalis is another reference to the nickname "the chicken from hell", as well as the place where the fossils came from - an area called "Hell Creek" in South Dakota.
According to estimates, the Aonferon Infernalis weighed about 170 kilos - smaller than Enzo Wiley, but with the ability to run extremely fast.
It lived between 100 and 65 million years ago, probably slightly before the more familiar species.
This discovery is a reminder of the amount of information we still lack about ancient eras, such as the one in which the dinosaurs lived, and the surprising ways in which more and more details about them are revealed.
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