Tiny dinosaur likely hunted during night
Doyle Rice
USA TODAY
Though most dinosaurs are thought to have hunted primarily during the day, a little bird-like dinosaur may have been strictly a night hunter, a new study suggested.
The dinosaur, Shuvuuia deserti, was small, about the size of a chicken, and it lived about 65 million years ago in the deserts of what is now Mongolia.
Shuvuuia’s skeleton is among the most bizarre of all dinosaurs, the study said. It had a fragile, bird-like skull; brawny, weightlifter arms with a single claw on each hand; and long, roadrunner- like legs.
It had some of the proportionally largest pupils ever measured in either birds or dinosaurs.
“For many decades, dinosaurs were considered to be day-active,” study coauthor Lars Schmitz, a biologist at the W.M. Keck Science Department in California, said in a statement. “Now we’re adding new evidence that some small, predatory dinosaurs could have been night-active instead,
which changes the thinking about diurnal and nocturnal dinosaurs.”
The study was published Thursday in the peer-reviewed journal Science.
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