New Raptor Dinosaur Used Giant Claw to Pin, Slash Prey?
"Incredibly rare" fossils give insight into raptor behavior, study says.
The six-foot-long (two-meter-long) Talos sampsonsi lived in the rainy, "hothouse world" of late-Cretaceous North America, which was then two continents—Laramidia in the west and Appalachia in the east—divided by a shallow seaway.
It's one of the few troodontid theropods—small, birdlike predators—ever discovered in North America, said study leader Lindsay Zanno, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.
Doctoral student Mike Knell, who found Talos while searching for fossil turtles in Utah in 2008, "stumbled across one of the nicest raptors that we've found in North America," she said.
"It was a thrilling discovery for those of us who got to work on it."
The dinosaur is named for the mythological Greek figure Talos—a winged figure that
