{"id":65767,"date":"2025-12-28T15:32:50","date_gmt":"2025-12-28T15:32:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/lesotho\/all-news\/new-chicken-like-dinosaur-fossils-discovered"},"modified":"2025-12-28T16:05:21","modified_gmt":"2025-12-28T16:05:21","slug":"new-chicken-like-dinosaur-fossils-discovered","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/lesotho\/all-news\/new-chicken-like-dinosaur-fossils-discovered","title":{"rendered":"New Chicken-Like Dinosaur Fossils Discovered"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"ap-article-header-tag\"> <strong>Africa-Press &#8211; Lesotho. <\/strong> <\/span>This \u201cchicken from hell\u201d walked the earth more than 66 million years ago.<\/p>\n<p>A new species of dinosaur was recently discovered by a student from the Oklahoma State University Center for Health Sciences, according to a new study published in the journal PLOS One.<\/p>\n<p>Kyle Atkins-Weltman, a Ph.D. student was studying a small collection of fossils he had purchased for $5,000 in 2020 for a research project when he made the discovery. At the time, he believed those fossils belonged to a juvenile Anzu wyliei dinosaur which is nicknamed the \u201cchicken from hell\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>But when Atkins-Weltman took his fossils to be scanned, he realized that they belonged to a species that had yet to be discovered.<\/p>\n<p>The fossils belonged to a different species in the dinosaur family caenagnathid which belonged to the Upper Cretaceous of North America and Asia. Atkins-Weltman has named the new dinosaur Eoneophron infernalis which translates to \u201cPharaoh\u2019s dawn chicken from hell\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>The fossils date back to the Cretaceous period\u2014a period that existed between 100.5 million to 66 million years ago, just before an asteroid impact drove dinosaurs to extinction.<\/p>\n<p>This newly discovered dinosaur was believed to have weighed between 150 and 160 pounds and stood about 3 feet tall at the hip\u2014roughly the size of a person. The fossils were found in Meade County which makes up part of the Hell Creek Formation that flows through parts of Montana, Wyoming, and North and South Dakota.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt was a very bird-like dinosaur. It had a toothless beak and relatively short tail. It\u2019s hard to tell its diet because of the toothless beak,\u201d the student said. \u201cIt definitely had feathers. It was covered in feathers and had wings.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Both the newly discovered dinosaur and the A. wyliei were oviraptorosaurs that featured long, slender limbs and toothless beaks. This human-sized dinosaur would have had three-fingered hands with sharp claws as well as a short tail. A. wyliei, however, would have weighed approximately 440 to 660 pounds.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI\u2019d make an educated guess that they were omnivores, with different species possibly leaning more towards carnivory or herbivory,\u201d Atkins-Weltman said.<\/p>\n<p>E. infernalis will be handed over to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh as a donation to their collection. Because even though he purchased the fossils for his research project, Atkins-Weltman admitted that the fossil market is problematic.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ap-article-footer-note\">Find more news and analyses on <span class=\"ap-highlight-country\">Lesotho<\/span> on the <span class=\"ap-highlight-brand\">Africa Press<\/span> website<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Africa-Press &#8211; Lesotho. This \u201cchicken from hell\u201d walked the earth more than 66 million years ago. A new species of dinosaur was recently discovered by a student from the Oklahoma State University Center for Health Sciences, according to a new study published in the journal PLOS One. Kyle Atkins-Weltman, a Ph.D. student was studying a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":84,"featured_media":65766,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,9],"tags":[245],"class_list":["post-65767","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-all-news","category-miscellaneous","tag-lesotho"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v26.1 (Yoast SEO v27.0) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-premium-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>New Chicken-Like Dinosaur Fossils Discovered - Lesotho<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"-article-header-tag&quot;&gt; Africa-Press - Lesotho. 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