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Dumb as a dinosaur – Metro US

Dumb as a dinosaur

Meet Hesperonychus elizabethae, the smallest dinosaur ever to stalk the Jurassic jungles of North America.

Hesperonychus lived 75 million years ago, weighed about two kilograms and stood about 50 centimetres tall. He was the equivalent of a prehistoric chicken, complete with feathers.

Only much nastier.

Hesperonychus was a tiny, perfect relative of Velociraptor, the ferocious thug featured in the Jurassic Park movies, and came equipped with its cousin’s sharp claws and teeth. You wouldn’t want to run into a flock of these dino-mites.

Hesperonychus was discovered by Canadian Nick Longrich, a paleontologist at the University of Calgary, who did his fieldwork by rummaging around in a drawer.

Apparently the little dino’s bones had been dug up in 1982, but no one took a close look at the little hip bone in question until 2007 when Longrich acted on a hunch.

Previous paleontologists had taken a pass, believing it to be from a juvenile of a known species, but Longrich noted discoveries of small dinos in Asia, and wondered why no one had found their North American relatives.

Like, um, a dog with a bone, he deduced that it represented a whole new species.

A very Canadian discovery, this.

A four-pound prehistoric chicken discovered at the back of a drawer in a university lab.

What’s so important about this fierce, but fortunately extinct little beast?

Well, it begins to paint a more complete picture of the Jurassic ecology; it tells us more about the ancestors of our feathered friends, and it reminds us that big things come in small packages.

Longrich himself sees an object lesson — Hesperonychus avoided detection, even if it was right under our noses all this time, because of something he calls “collecting bias” — paleontologists are human too, so they spend most of their time looking for T-Rex and have a tendency to ignore such tiny treasures.

It takes a Canadian sensibility, I guess, to think small enough.

I hate to end this on a depressing note, but of course this discovery has prompted the people who learned their natural history studying the Flintstones, to state with conviction that Hesperonychus could not be 75 million years old, because as any idiot knows God created the world only 6013 years ago, and it took him seven days to do it.

It’s hard to believe that such stupidity and lucidity can co-exist at the same time in the same nation, but that’s evolution for you.

I remain confident that natural selection will take care of the former, and advance the latter.

– Paul Sullivan is a Vancouver-based journalist and owner of Sullivan Media Consulting;
vancouverletters@metronews.ca.