Years of hard work by scientists has resulted in quite the dinosaur species known as the Anzu Wyliei, also titledm the Chicken From Hell.
"We jokingly call this thing the 'Chicken From Hell,' and I think that's pretty appropriate," Matthew Lamanna, a paleontologist at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, said in a statement NBC News reported.
Archaeologists examined three separate dinosaur configurations to come up with the species that was 10 feet in height, was 500 pounds, and had claws to help it if it encountered enemies such as a Tyrannosaurus Rex.
"We're finding that caenagnathids were an amazingly diverse bunch of dinosaurs," Lamanna told NBC News. "Whereas some were turkey-sized, others - like Anzu and Gigantoraptor - were the kind of thing you definitely wouldn't want to meet in a dark alley. Apparently these oviraptorosaurs occupied a much wider range of body sizes and ecologies than we previously thought."
Lamanna and his team had many names to choose from, but ended up with the most logical one.
"All the names we came up with were just ridiculously unpronounceable. So, I thought that if I couldn't come up with a name that literally meant chicken from hell, I could at least name it feathered demon," Lamanna told USA Today.
"For almost a hundred years, the presence of oviraptorosaurs in North America was only known from a few bits of skeleton, and the details of their appearance and biology remained a mystery," Hans-Dieter Sues of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History said in a statement in a news release NBC News reported.
"With the discovery of A. wyliei, we finally have the fossil evidence to show what this species looked like and how it is related to other dinosaurs," Sues said in the statement.
Lamanna, Sues, and Emma Schachner from The University of Utah began examining the fossils in 2005.
"These animals were clearly able to survive quite a bit of trauma, as two of the specimens show signs of semi-healed damage," Schachner said in a statement NBC News reported. "Whether these injuries were the result of combat between two individuals or an attack by a larger predator remains a mystery."
