Name: 体を失っていた巨大恐竜 (The Giant Dinosaur That Was Missing a Body)
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T08:40:03.000Z
Duration: 12 min 34 s
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It didn't take long for Pascal Godefroit to realize he was looking at a stolen dinosaur.

And Godefroit, a paleontologist at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, had

been called to France by an acquaintance who was a fossil dealer.

The dealer had been approached by a German collector who'd come into possession of

some Mongolian dinosaur fossils that had changed hands multiple times, traveling from Central

Asia to Japan and then all the way to Europe.

There was a skull measuring over a meter long--as well as a variety of hand and foot bones.

Clearly, these had come from a large-bodied animal.

But the one thing that really caught Godefroit's attention were the bones of the creature's

To him, they looked pretty darn familiar.

They reminded him of the huge hands of a mysterious dino that was first discovered in the Gobi

The dinosaur in question was a big theropod that, at the time, was known mostly from fossils

of its most distinctive feature: its enormous arms.

From end to end, the forelimbs alone measured

an incredible 2.4 meters long and were tipped with big, comma-shaped claws.

Scientists had called the newfound dinosaur Deinocheirus, which means “horrible hand.”

But other than its bizarre arms, very little material from this dinosaur had been found:

no skull, no feet, almost nothing that could give experts a fuller picture of what this

So for more than 40 years, nearly everything about Deinocheirus was a mystery: how big it

was it? What did it eat? How was it related to other species? And just … what did it looked like.

The bones Godefroit recognized in that chance encounter in France would be the first big

But before the mystery of Deinocheirus could be solved, paleontologists would have to contend

with the darker side of their science: things like vandalism, poachers, and the black market

And in the end, the creature they would discover would turn out to be, from head to tail, one

Deinocheirus was first described by a Polish paleontologist who had been prospecting in

the Gobi Desert for fossils from the Late Cretaceous Period.

There, she and her team discovered three fragmented backbones, some ribs, and several of the stomach-lining

bones called gastralia that dated to around 70 million years ago.

And then there were, of course, the arms.

Each one was found with shoulder bones intact.

And although the right arm was missing its claws, the left arm was basically complete.

Even so, for a long time, scientists couldn't do much more than speculate about what the

rest of the owner of those giant arms looked like.

As early as 1969, paleontologists had noticed that the hands and upper arm bones of Deinocheirus

looked a lot like those of Ornithomimus, a dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous of North

Ornithomimosaurs, also known as “ostrich mimics,” were a group of beaked theropods with long

But there's long, and then there's loong.

Deinocheirus' arms would've dwarfed those of Ornithomimus.

Your typical ornithomimosaur ranged from around 2.5 to 7 meters long.

And the biggest Ornithomimus had an overall body length of about 3.8 meters.

So the entire animal wasn't much bigger than a single Deinocheirus forelimb.

But without the rest of the body, paleontologists couldn't say whether Deinocheirus fit the

These dinos had long, narrow beaks, and most species were toothless.

They also tended to have huge eye sockets.

And just like real ostriches, many of the ostrich mimics had long, powerful hindlimbs.

Scientists estimate that certain ornithomimosaurs might've had a top running speed of anywhere

As far as feeding goes, it's been hypothesized that some ornithomimosaurs used their long

arms and slender fingers to grasp fern fronds and tree limbs.

And plant-eating in these dinos has been supported by the discovery of a dozen skeletons of Sinornithomimus

with clumps of gastroliths inside their body cavities.

Gastroliths are tiny rocks that get some animals swallow to help grind up food inside their

And in modern birds, gastroliths are usually associated with a plant-based diet.

However, most experts think that--in addition to plants--ornithomimosaurs probably ate insects

In other words, many--if not all--of these ostrich dinosaurs were likely omnivorous.

But again, without more fossils, paleontologists couldn't be sure about what Deinocheirus

ate--or where it belonged on the family tree.

Still, as time went by, most experts agreed that Deinocheirus was probably an ornithomimosaur--just

That year, scientists involved with the Korea-Mongolia International Dinosaur Project seemed to hit

At a new dig site in the Gobi's Nemegt Basin, they found fresh material from a different

Deinocheirus, including elements from the hips, hind legs, and vertebrae.

And better still, an incomplete arm, more backbones, and other parts of a third Deinocheirus

turned up at yet another new quarry in 2009.

But unfortunately, both of the new sites had already been ravaged by fossil-poachers - a

Raiders had smashed up many of the fossils, and it looked like other bones--including

a skull--had been taken and smuggled out of the country.

Poachers often take skulls, hands, and feet, and then destroy or leave behind the rest

But enough fossils were left that the experts could identify the two new specimens as Deinocheirus,

based on comparisons with the material found in 1965.

And after word of all the new discoveries got out, the paleontologists caught a lucky

break, in that meeting with the fossil trader in France.

After seeing the German collector's fossils, Godefroit got in touch with the team that

He told them he'd seen the bones of a strange - and familiar - Mongolian dinosaur.

The hand bones from this specimen had definitely came from a Deinocheirus.

And there was more: A right foot included with the collector's specimens was missing

a toe bone; there was just an empty impression in the rock where it should've been.

But that little bone wasn't lost forever.

A toe bone that had just been recovered in 2009 fit the empty impression perfectly: the

missing toe and the fossil-collector's bones came from same individual!

Clearly, the specimens in France were the very bones that had been poached from one

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体を失っていた巨大恐竜 (The Giant Dinosaur That Was Missing a Body)

weird

material

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bizarre