Episode 17 is all about Anzu wyliei, nicknamed “the chicken from hell.”

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In this episode, we discuss:

• The dinosaur of the day: Anzu wyliei, which is the name of a feathered Mesopotamian demon
• The wyliei name comes from a boy named Wylie, a dinosaur enthusiast and grandson of a Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh trustee
• Dr. Matthew Lamanna from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and Dr. Hans-Dieter Sues and Dr. Tyler Lyson from the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, and Dr. Emma Schachner from the University of Utah all studied Anzu
• Dr. Tyler Lyson first found the bones of the third Anzu skeleton when he was a teenager (on his uncle’s ranch in North Dakota)
• Scientists found partial fossils of three skeletons in North and South Dakota, in the Hell Creek formation (formed at the end of the Cretaceous, and known for its T-rex and Triceratops fossils)
• Anzu lived on a wet floodplain
• Anzu was bird-like, with a bony crest on top of head and a long tail
• Anzu had a tall, thin crest; big beak, sliding jaw joint (could have been used to eat plants and meat)
• Anzu was about the size of a small car, with claws and feathers on its upper arms (a cross between an emu and a modern reptile)
• Anzu was 11 feet long, 5 feet tall at the hip, and weighed 440 to 660 pounds
• It had a toothless beak, and the crest on its head is similar to a cassowary
• Probably had feathers
• Because of Anzu, paleontologists now know for sure that Anzu, Caenagnathus, and Chriostenotes are their own group in Oviraptorosauria, and that Gigantoraptor (the largest oviraptorosaur known, weighing 1.5 tons) also belongs to the Caenagnathidae group (some in this group are small, turkey-sized, but they are very diverse group)
• Even though Anzu’s head is strange looking, its body is similar to Velociraptor, which lived a few million years earlier
• Anzu seems to have gotten a lot of injuries. Two of the three Anzu specimens have injuries, one with a broken and healed rib, the other with an arthritic toe bone caused by a fracture where a tendon ripped off a piece of bone). It’s unclear whether Anzu fought among themselves or against larger predators, like T-rex
• According to Dr. Sues and his team, though climate change may have contributed to dinosaurs going extinct, Anzu proves that dinosaurs were still evolving and were diverse even at the end. This helps prove it was the aestroid that killed dinosaurs
• The three Anzu skeletons are in the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh (they helped identify Anzu)
• Anzu is an Oviraptorosaur, whose name comes from the first skeleton found in 1924 that was on top a dinosaur egg nest, and scientists thought it was stealing the eggs. But in the 1990s, a baby oviraptorid egg was found inside a nest, which showed Oviraptorosaur was a good parent just protecting its eggs
• Caenagnathids, oviraptorids, and other species from China are closely related, so paleontologists grouped them in the theropod group Oviraptorosauria
• The name Caenagnathus means “recent jaws.” The first caenagnathids found were thought to be close relatives of birds like ostriches because they had similar lower jaws. But now scientists think this similarity evolved convergently with modern birds
• The Caenagnathidae family, along with the family Oviraptoridae, is part of the superfamily Caenagnathoidea
• Caenagnathids are very similar to Oviraptoridae, but they have distinct jaws (long and shallow, not as powerful a bite). The lower jaws also had ridges and shelf-like structures (crushing surface), and they were hollow and air filled as part of an air sac system. Caenagnathids are also lighter than Oviraptorids, with slender arms and long legs
• Another difference between caenagnathids and oviraptorids is that caenagnathids tended to live in humid floodplains, and oviraptorids lived in arid areas
• There are about 12 named caenagnathid species, but not all may be valid (some named from fragments of skeletons)
• Fun fact: Dinosaur eggs are found in many different shapes and sizes. Most are spherical, and some can be almost 1 foot long, though the smallest found so far is only about 1 inch long. Fossilized eggs are hard like rocks, but they retain their structures.