Word: flightless
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Dates: during 1993-1993
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Surprises crop up constantly. The latest: a new species from Mongolia, announced last week by Norell and several U.S. and Mongolian scientists. Known as Mononychus (meaning one claw), the turkey-size animal looked like a modern, flightless bird, complete with feathers, but had bone structures characteristic of both birds and dinosaurs. Its discovery cements the bird- dinosaur link even more firmly...
There are researchers skeptical, of course, about how Mononychus is labeled and about the larger question of how dinosaurs are related to birds. But since scientists cannot really decide for sure whether Mononychus should be considered a primitive flightless bird or a dinosaur, it seems plausible that there is really no essential distinction: it was both...