These newly discovered raptors were like feather-covered cheetahs
An artist's recreation of the newly discovered Dineobellator notohesperus at the end of the Cretaceous Period in New Mexico. (Sergey Krasovskiy/)A newly discovered dinosaur was a cousin of Velociraptor but might have been an even more formidable hunter than its family member.The raptor, which the researchers have named Dineobellator notohesperus, lived in northwestern New Mexico at the end of the Cretaceous Period. When paleontologists examined a partial skeleton of Dineobellator, they found features in its forelimbs, claws, and tail indicating that the dinosaur was both strong and nimble.The fossils are among the youngest known for any member of the raptor, or dromaeosaurid, family, and indicate that this group was splitting into new species right up until the end of the dinosaurs’ reign, says Steven Jasinski, a paleontologist at the State Museum of Pennsylvania in Harrisburg. He and his colleagues described the new species March 26 in the journal Scientific Reports.Dromaeosaurids...