A new species of dinosaur was recently discovered by a student from the Oklahoma State University Center for Health Sciences, according to a new study published in the journal PLOS One.
Kyle Atkins-Weltman, a Ph.D. student was studying a small collection of fossils he had purchased for $5,000 in 2020 for a research project when he made the discovery. At the time, he believed those fossils belonged to a juvenile Anzu wyliei dinosaur which is nicknamed the “chicken from hell”.
But when Atkins-Weltman took his fossils to be scanned, he realized that they belonged to a species that had yet to be discovered.
The fossils belonged to a different species in the dinosaur family caenagnathid which belonged to the Upper Cretaceous of North America and Asia. Atkins-Weltman has named the new dinosaur Eoneophron infernalis which translates to “Pharaoh’s dawn chicken from hell”.
The fossils date back to the Cretaceous period—a period that existed between 100.5 million to 66 million years ago, just before an asteroid impact drove dinosaurs to extinction.
This newly discovered dinosaur was believed to have weighed between 150 and 160 pounds and stood about 3 feet tall at the hip—roughly the size of a person. The fossils were found in Meade County which makes up part of the Hell Creek Formation that flows through parts of Montana, Wyoming, and North and South Dakota.
“It was a very bird-like dinosaur. It had a toothless beak and relatively short tail. It’s hard to tell its diet because of the toothless beak,” the student said. “It definitely had feathers. It was covered in feathers and had wings.”
Both the newly discovered dinosaur and the A. wyliei were oviraptorosaurs that featured long, slender limbs and toothless beaks. This human-sized dinosaur would have had three-fingered hands with sharp claws as well as a short tail. A. wyliei, however, would have weighed approximately 440 to 660 pounds.
“I’d make an educated guess that they were omnivores, with different species possibly leaning more towards carnivory or herbivory,” Atkins-Weltman said.
E. infernalis will be handed over to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh as a donation to their collection. Because even though he purchased the fossils for his research project, Atkins-Weltman admitted that the fossil market is problematic.
"Privately held bones are effectively useless to science if they're not accessible," he said.