Scientists have discovered a freakish, birdlike species of dinosaur — 11 feet long, 500 pounds, with a beak, no teeth, a bony crest atop its head, murderous claws, prizefighter arms, spindly legs, a thin tail and feathers sprouting all over the place. Officially, it's a member of a group of dinosaurs called oviraptorosaurs. Unofficially, it's the Chicken from Hell. This dino-bird is not actually a chicken, or even a bird. It's a dinosaur that lived about 66 million years ago. "This group of dinosaurs looks really bizarre even by dinosaurian standards," said Hans-Dieter Sues, a Smithsonian paleontologist and a co-author of the paper in the journal PLOS One. "It would look like a really absurd, stretched-out chicken," paleontologist Emma Schachner of the University of Utah said. The fossils of three specimens of the new dinosaur, scientifically named Anzu wyliei, were found at the Hell Creek Formation in North and South Dakota. The formation helped inspire the nickname. But there's also the matter of appearance: It looks like it could stomp you, rip you to pieces or simply peck you to death. It's a big animal, the biggest oviraptorosaur species found in North America. Carnegie Museum paleontologist Matthew Lamanna, the lead author of the study, and his colleagues spent close to a decade figuring out how the disarticulated bones of the three specimens fit together. There aren't many dinosaurs known from the end-Cretaceous period. This has led some scientists to argue that dinosaurs were petering out when the final whammy came in the form of a large asteroid that hit the Earth. But now comes Anzu, adding another genus to the dinosaur bestiary. Anzu also reminds everyone of the birdiness of dinosaurs, and the dinosaur-ness of birds. Paleontologists can become dyspeptic when they hear that dinosaurs are extinct. Not so: Birds are dinosaurs.

Did it … cluck? "We have no evidence that it clucked," Lamanna said.Washington Post