X

Scientists unveil weirdest dinosaur ever seen

Paleontologists have dug up the rest of a dinosaur whose long arms were found in the '60s. The rest makes it surely the strangest-looking creature ever.

Chris Matyszczyk
2 min read

dino6.jpg
The dinosaur that's arrived from one of your more colorful nightmares. University of Alberta/YouTube screenshot by Chris Matyszczyk/CNET

It's like a pantomime horse that swallowed a crocodile and leaped on the back of an ostrich that spent too many years taking human growth hormone.

No, it's like all the animators at Pixar were asked to create the oddest star of a new dinosaur movie franchise, after they'd been force-fed hallucinatory substances.

This is Deinocheirus mirificus, which translates to "unusual, horrible hand." He's a new, old creature announced by the paleontologists at the Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources (Kigam) in South Korea.

In the 1960s, scientists discovered excessively long arms belonging to a dinosaur of unknown type. They couldn't find the rest. However, as the BBC reports, now the rest of its body has been disinterred. And what a body.

Its beak is monstrous. It has rather ugly, hoofy feet. Then there's the enormous hump on its back that looks like something it swallowed is desperate to get out.

Yong-Nam Lee, the lead researcher on this quest to piece together a lost creature, was accurate in telling the BBC: "It turned out to be one of the weirdest dinosaurs. It's weird beyond our imagination."

The almost complete skeletons -- two of them -- were discovered in Mongolia. Once pieced together with the 8-foot arms, they comprised a whole that is 36 feet long and infinitely bizarre.

The University of Alberta has posted computer animation of how Deinocheirus mirificus might have moved. To some it might appear similar to a large, drunken comedian wandering around the stage of a New Jersey club.

The Korean scientists suspect that this other-worldly character dined on fish and plants. It may well be that the extra-long arms allowed for more efficient gardening.

Still, this creature surely defies the imaginations of so many who thought they'd imagined every possible thing that ever lived.

I wonder what Sam Neill would have said if he'd set eyes on this astounding being.