Announcements of new fossil discoveries are always exciting, and remains found from a site in eastern Shandong Province in China are no exception. Among the recovered fossils is part of the six-feet-wide skull of a horned dinosaur like
The problem with international discoveries, however, is that reporting agencies are not always adept at translating what scientists have to say. A r eport of the finds released by the news service AFP, and widely reproduced at sites like Yahoo!, said:
Included in the find was the largest "platypus"—or "duck-billed dinosaur" in Chinese—ever discovered measuring nine metres high with a wingspan wider than 16 metres, the report said.As amusing as the image of a platypus with a 52 foot wingspan is, something has definitely been lost in translation here. A platypus is an egg-laying mammal (a monotreme), and “duck-billed dinosaurs” were hadrosaurs like Edmontosaurus. Hadrosaurus did not have wings, but pterosaurs (which were not dinosaurs) did. Even so, the largest estimated wingspan for a pterosaur belongs to Quetzalcoatlus at a maximum of about 33 feet. If there was a creature with a 52-foot wingspan, it certainly is a significant find, but I can say with certainty that it was not a platypus or a hadrosaur.
Translation difficulties aside, it sounds like the site is a treasure trove of significant new fossils. They probably will not appear in the scientific literature for a few years yet, but I am looking forward to learning the truth about these new fossils.
Image courtesy of Flickr/Wikimedia Commons