A recent study, published in the journal Nature Communications, has found that the "parrot dinosaur" was a quadruped animal during the earlier evolutionary stages of the lifespan of the species. The team of paleontologists discovered that the the dinosaur was one of the few that went from walking on all fours to walking on two. The discovery of the quadruped past of the parrot dinosaur was made via biomechanical analysis and bone histology from paleontologists from Beijing, Bristol and Bonn.
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"This remarkable study, the first of its kind, shows how much information is locked in the bones of dinosaurs," Professor Xing Xu of the Beijing Institute said in a statement.
According to Qi Zhao, of the Institute for Vertebrate Paleontology in Beijing, the team studied bone sections from adult, juvenile and infantile parrot dinosaurs in a palaeohistology laboratory in Bonn, Germany.
"Some of the bones from the baby Psittacosaurus were only a few millimeters across, so I had to handle them extremely carefully to make useful bone sections," Zhao said. "I also had to be sure to cause as little damage to these valuable specimens as possible."
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The team's findings were surprising: the newly born dinosaurs walked on all-fours but the arm growth slowed down during ages four to six and the discrepancy between arm and leg lengths made it vital for the creature to stand on its hind legs in adulthood.
"Having four-legged babies and juveniles suggests that at some time in their ancestry, both juveniles and adults were also four-legged, and Psittacosaurus and dinosaurs in general became secondarily bipedal," said Zhao to the Australian Associated Press.
The parrot dinosaur, whose official name is the psittacosaurus, is 100 million years old and lived in China. The dinosaur was small herbivore that was most likely fast and has no teeth. That said, the animal had a horny beak.
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