WASHINGTON, May 4: Birdlike dinosaurs newly unearthed in Utah may be a missing link between primitive meat-eating creatures and more evolved vegetarians, US researchers reported on Wednesday. The 125-million-year-old fossils show features of two-legged carnivorous dinosaurs called maniraptorans, from which birds are believed to have evolved, they said.

The fossils also have leaf-shaped teeth, stubby legs and the expansive bellies of plant-eaters, the researchers reported in this week’s issue of the journal Nature. The new species is named Falcarius utahensis, meaning “sickle-maker from Utah.” “Falcarius is literally a missing link,” Scott Sampson, chief curator at the Utah Museum of Natural History, told a news conference.

“Falcarius is kind of half-raptor and half herbivore. This transition is triggered by a shift in diet.” It appeared at around the time that tasty, nutritious, flowering plants appeared on Earth, he said. “We know that the first dinosaur was a small-bodied, lightly built, fleet-footed predator,” Sampson added. All other dinosaurs evolved from it.

“However, as with many radiations of major groups of animals, it happened so quickly that we really don’t have much in the way of fossil documentation.” Falcarius provides part of the picture, he said.

The adult Falcarius would have walked on two legs and was about four metres long and 1.4 metres tall. It had strong forearms, sharp, curved, 10-centimetre claws and a long neck. —Reuters