The "Chicken from Hell" Story

It was an ordinary day.  Reading an article in my daily newspaper titled "Chicken from Hell."  Seems like millions of years ago, that's before we were all born, a bird-like dinosaur, known  as the "chicken from hell,"  roamed the North American continent.  I would have loved to have seen one!  It supposedly weighed about 170 pounds and sported a toothless beak and was blanketed by a layer of feathers.  The previously unknown pre-historic creature was recently identified using fossilized bones found in South Dakota.  The bones, including a femur and tibia, were discovered in Meade Conti, which makes up part of the Hell Creek Formation, a swath of sedimentary rock littered with the remains of old plant and animal life.  Oklahoma State University researchers initially thought they might belong to a larger dinosaur called Anzu Wyliei.  However, the newfound creature is a type of oviraptorosaur, a family of human-sized theropods with slender limbs and grasping hands.  Characterized by their "unusual" skulls, they were found throughout North America and Asia during the Late Cretaceous period, which lasted from about 100 to 66 million years ago.  The new species was named Eoneophron infernal  which can be translated to "Pharaoh's dawn chicken from hell."  It would have stood about three feet high at the hip and had wings and a short tail.  "It's hard to tell its diet because of the toothless beak," Atkins-Weltman aded.  Both herbivorous and omnivorous oviraptorosaur species have been previously discovered.  The creature would have been social, employing an "avian-like brain organization," researchers said.  "Our new discovery suggests that this dinosaur group was not declining in diversity at the very end of the Cretaceous," researchers wrote in The Conversation.  The Cretaceous came to a sudden end 66 million years ago when an asteroid slammed into Earth.  Wouldn't you just know that would happen!  I would have loved to have found out a bit more about the "Chicken from Hell," but it wasn't to be.  Perhaps something similar will appear while we are still all alive and can view it.  It was another extraordinary day int the life of an ordinary guy.