Half a century ago, in 1970, the Polish paleontologist Halszka Osmólska, who participated in various excavations in Mongolia in the second half of the 20th century, discovered in the Gobi desert, in the south of that country, very incomplete fossil remains of a small immature dinosaur, probably just hatched, that looked like a miniature version of a velociraptor. However, with only a few bones of the foot and a fragment of the skull, its classification was not easy, although at least the large sickle-shaped claw on the second toe indicated that it was a dromaeosaur, like the sinornithosaurus or the aforementioned velociraptor. More than a decade later, in 1982, Osmólska formally described it as Hulsanpes, meaning “Khulsan’s foot”, after the Mongolian town where it was found. This dinosaur lived about seventy million years ago in a dune field inhabited by lizards, primitive birds and mammals, and other dinosaurs.
Years passed, and in 2015, paleontologists Pascal Godefroit and Andrea Cau, from the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, in Brussels, received a visit from another paleontologist François Escuillié, director of the French company Eldonia, which is dedicated to the commercialization of original fossils and replicas. The visitor wanted his help to verify the authenticity of a fossil that had come into his hands after several years of passing through different private collectors, first in Japan and then in Great Britain, and that he had identified as a new, unknown species. until then for science. The specimen, which probably came from southern Mongolia and had been illegally excavated, appeared to be a nearly complete skeleton, with only the left side exposed, embedded in a block of sandstone. However, its strange anatomical characteristics and its uncertain origin led to the suspicion that it could be a forgery, a chimera formed by the union of fossil remains of several different species: the animal had the neck of a swan, the wings of a penguin, the legs of a velociraptor, with its retractable sickle-shaped claw, and crocodile snout and teeth. The scientists took the fossil to the European Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory in Grenoble, where X-rays determined that the skeleton was still inside the rock and that it was not a chimera, although some elements had been broken off and glued back together. and the end of the muzzle was restored with plaster.
In December 2017, having verified the origin and authenticity of the fossil, Cau and Godefroit, together with Vincent Beyrand, from the University of Zurich, Dennis Voeten, from the University of Uppsala, Vincent Fernandez, from the Natural History Museum in London, Paul Tafforeau of the European Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory, Koen Stein of the Free University of Brussels, Rinchen Barsbold of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences, Khishigjav Tsogtbaatar of the Mongolian Institute of Paleontology and Geology, and Philip John Currie of the University from Alberta, published in the journal Nature the description of the new species, a close relative of Hulsanpes, which they gave the name Halszkaraptor escuilliei. The generic name pays homage to Halszka Osmólska, and the specific name to Escuillié, who had provided the specimen and later handed it over to the Mongolian authorities.
Halszkaraptor lived in Mongolia at the end of the Cretaceous, about 75 million years ago. It is a bipedal dinosaur the size of a duck, or surely something bigger: the skeleton we know of corresponds to a one-year-old. The head is seven centimeters long. The snout, long and flattened, spoon-shaped, is highly vascularized; it was probably endowed with highly sensitive sense organs. Each premaxillary bone, at the end of the upper jaw, houses eleven crowded, long, curved teeth, a greater number of teeth than in any other dinosaur. In the rest of the upper jaw there are twenty or twenty-five teeth on each side, more robust and spaced, transversely flattened and with only the curved tip. In the lower jaw there are also between twenty and twenty-five teeth on each side. The nostrils are delayed. The neck is very long, constituting half of the total length of the animal. The arms are short; hind legs long and strong; and the tail, short and flexible.
Halszkaraptor is a dromaeosaur, but something different from the ones we know… It is a good runner, yes, but its anatomical characteristics indicate that it is also an aquatic animal. The short front legs, similar to the flippers of penguins, are used for swimming; the trunk stands more upright than in other running dinosaurs; the short tail makes the center of gravity more forward than in other dromaeosaurs, which is more useful in water than on land; and the sensitive, toothy snout is adapted to detecting and catching fish. It has many similarities with modern Serretas, fishing ducks with a long, serrated bill.
The climate of the region where Halszkaraptor lived was then quite similar to today’s, perhaps a little warmer and less arid: dune fields dotted with oases and interspersed with boulevards. Halszkaraptor must have lived in these oases. Frogs, crocodiles, lizards, primitive mammals and other dinosaurs have also been found there.
And his relative Hulsanpes? Despite the incompleteness of its remains, it appears to have some adaptations to aquatic life as well, although it was more terrestrial than Halszkaraptor. And there is a third species that has been related to these two. This is Mahakala, discovered in 2007, who lived a few million years earlier in the same place as Halszkaraptor, in what is now the Gobi desert. Mahakala is named after one of the eight patron deities of Tibetan Buddhism. It is the oldest known dromaeosaur, and it is a small predator of about seventy centimeters in length, with very short arms, which does not have the adaptations for aquatic life of its relatives. This species is important because it tells us that the small size was not an adaptation of the dromaeosaurs on the evolutionary path towards birds, but was a characteristic of the group from its beginnings.
We are used to thinking of dromaeosaurs as agile land predators, but Halszkaraptor has revealed to us that their diversity was greater than we thought.
CONSTRUCTION OF GERMAN FERNÁNDEZ:
reticular infiltrate
Reticular Infiltrator is the first novel in the trilogy The Saga of the Borelians. Do you want to see how it starts? Here you can read the first two chapters.
The Karnak file. Ed.Rubeo
The hanged man and other fantastic tales. Ed.Rubeo