{"id":667784,"date":"2026-05-27T09:35:16","date_gmt":"2026-05-27T09:35:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/667784\/"},"modified":"2026-05-27T09:35:16","modified_gmt":"2026-05-27T09:35:16","slug":"tail-belonging-to-strange-ostrich-like-dinosaur-discovered-off-coast-of-canada","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/667784\/","title":{"rendered":"Tail belonging to strange ostrich-like dinosaur discovered off coast of Canada"},"content":{"rendered":"

An 80-million-year-old tail found on a small island off the coast of British Columbia<\/a> was the clearest evidence yet that ostrich-like dinosaurs once roamed North America<\/a>\u2019s Pacific coastline, researchers said.<\/p>\n

These fast-running, bird-like theropod dinosaurs called ornithomimosaurs<\/a> lived during the Cretaceous period from 145 million to 66 million years ago.<\/p>\n

They had small heads, slender bodies, toothless beaks, as well as long legs and necks, which made them resemble modern-day ostriches<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In a recent dig, researchers discovered an isolated caudal vertebra, or tail bone, on Denman Island, and identified it as \u201cbelonging to an indeterminate ornithomimosaur\u201d.<\/p>\n

Initially, according to a study published in the journal FACETS, researchers could not identify the specimen more precisely to pinpoint the exact species.<\/p>\n

So, they did CT scans of the fossil to create a 3D model, which they compared to the tail bones of complete ornithomimosaur and tyrannosaur skeletons held in various museums.<\/p>\n

This methodology revealed that the fossil most closely resembled the ornithomimosaur tail bone.<\/p>\n

\"Illustration<\/p>\n

Illustration of Ornithomimus (Julius Csotonyi via University of Alberta)<\/p>\n

Researchers suspect it is likely the 10th bone of the caudal vertebra of a two-legged ornithomimosaur.<\/p>\n

They suspect the bone was deposited on the Canadian island by a floating carcass, carried by waves or likely transported by another scavenging dinosaur.<\/p>\n

\u201cHow exactly the bone came to be deposited in this location is unknown but some possibilities include disarticulation from a floating carcass, transport from a carcass along the shoreline via wave action or turbidity current, or transport via scavenging,\u201d they wrote in the study.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll of this evidence suggests the ornithomimosaur represented by the fossil was living on the western margin of North America.\u201d<\/p>\n

How different this dinosaur was from those found elsewhere in North America, researchers said, \u201ccan only be answered with additional fossil discoveries\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An 80-million-year-old tail found on a small island off the coast of British Columbia was the clearest evidence…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":667785,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[291645,290947,291646,7986,79,291647,291644,201],"class_list":["post-667784","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-caudal-vertebra","tag-denman-island","tag-ornithomimosaurs","tag-researchers","tag-science","tag-tail-bone","tag-theropod-dinosaurs","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/667784","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=667784"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/667784\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/667785"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=667784"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=667784"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=667784"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}