An artist's rendition of the "chicken from hell."MARK KLINGLER/CARNEGIE MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORYIts official name is Anzu wyliei, but researchers studying a pile of fossilized bones unearthed a decade ago have given the newly described species to whom they belonged a much more apt moniker: “the chicken from hell.”
“If you were to take a time machine back to the end of the age of dinosaurs and encountered this animal, your first thought would probably be, ‘What a big, weird looking bird,’” Matthew Lamanna, a paleontologist at Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh and lead author on the PLOS One paper reporting the find, told NPR. "I actually think ‘chicken from hell’ is a pretty good nickname for this thing."
Discovered in the Hell Creek geological formation of Montana and the Dakotas, the 66-million-year-old fossils belonged to a fast-running, 500-pound, four-meter-long creature with a bony crest atop its head and five-inch claws at the end of feathered, wing-like forelimbs. Lamanna and his colleagues studied the bones for a decade, and finally arrived at ...
