A black-and-white artist's rendering of the smallest meat-eating dinosaur shows it chasing a cicada in Alberta, Canada, 75 million years ago.
WASHINGTON – Imagine a vicious velociraptor like those in “Jurassic Park,” but only as big as a modern chicken.
That’s what Canadian researchers say they have found, the smallest meat-eating dinosaur yet discovered in North America.
This pint-sized cousin of velociraptor, weighing in at 4 to 5 pounds, “probably hunted and ate whatever it could for its size – insects, mammals, amphibians and maybe even baby dinosaurs,” said Nicholas Longrich of the University of Calgary.
The creature lived 75 million years ago in the swamps and forests of southern Alberta, Longrich and colleague Philip J. Currie report in Tuesday’s edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
There has been plenty of evidence for large and medium-size dinosaurs in North America, but not small ones, Longrich said. Now researchers say there was a dinosaur filling that niche.
The bones of the small raptor were discovered among fossils that had been collected a quarter-century ago and remained in a museum drawer, Longrich said.
Similar small dinosaurs have been uncovered in China.
“It was hard to tell because it was still encased in rock,” Longrich said. “It is only because I had been studying the Chinese dinosaurs I could tell what it was.”