Girly Dinosaur Was Handy

Galvasean

A strange new dinosaur named Sarahsaurus has been described. It lived in Arizona during the early Jurassic period. Strangely, it had small front legs/arms with extremely powerful clawed hands. What tehy were used for is a mystery which has scientists completely bamboozled!

"We've never found anything like this in western North America," said Tim Rowe, who led the project and is a professor of paleontology at The University of Texas at Austin's Jackson School of Geosciences. "Its hand is smaller than my hand, but if you line the base of the thumbs up, this small hand is much more powerfully built than my hand and it has these big claws. It's a very strange animal. It's doing something with its hands that involved great strength and power, but we don't know what."

What is known is that Sarahsaurus lived about 190 million years ago during the Early Jurassic Period. The dino was 14 feet long and weighed about 250 pounds. It possessed physical traits usually associated with gigantic animals. For example, its thigh bones were long and straight like pillars, yet were not much larger than a human's thigh bones. Sarahsaurus shows that sauropodmorphs started out small and later evolved to a very large size.

Full article here.


Image by Nicola Wong Ken

Yitzhak Rabin

I'm racking my brains trying to think what those hands could have been used for.

Is there any comparable animal with a niche like that today?

whatdoicare

Cracking open shelled animals like turtle type species maybe? or digging out small animals from trees or mounds?

If it was a herbivore maybe breaking bamboo like plants?

Rubecula

Dino version of a kangaroo? pushed food into its mouth and beat off rivals with its arms like boxing kangaroo's do?

I dunno but one guess is as good as any I suppose.

Galvasean

Best I can think of is the way otters bash shelfish.

Mayby Sarahsaurus broke open large nuts in a similar fashion?

FWIW, anyone else think they should have called this dinosaur Sarahsaura? Generally when femininity is implied on a dinosaur name they replace the 'us' at the end with 'a' like Maiasaura ('mother lizard') or Leaellynasaura ("Leaellyn's lizard").