Vegetarian convert: An reconstruction of what the unusual sloth-like dinosaur may have looked like. The creature's talons would likely have been used for defence or foraging, rather than attack.

Credit: Carnegie Museum/Mark Klinger

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ADELAIDE: Despite vicious-looking claws, the newly discovered dinosaur Suzhousaurus megatherioides was a bizarre, waddling plant eater.

The 'giant sloth-like reptile from Suzhou' lived around 115 million years ago and was recently unearthed by a team of Chinese and U.S. palaeontologists in China's north western Gansu province. The species is an oddity for a number of reasons.

“Suzhousaurus belongs to a strange group of dinosaurs called therizinosaurs, which are characterised by long necks capped by small heads, massive arms tipped with enormous claws, and flaring ribs and hip bones that make their bodies very wide,” said Matt Lamanna, a vertebrate palaeontologist of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

As his team report in the Chinese journal Acta Geologica Sinica they found a partial skeleton of Suzhousaurus, with most of the back vertebrae, a few ribs, the shoulder blade, an upper arm, and part of the hips. They based the rest of their reconstruction on related species.

Waddling gait

Descended from the carnivorous therapods - a group including famous meat-eaters such as Tyrannosaurus rex and the Velociraptor - the therizinosaurs are thought to have evolved into plant eaters.

While Suzhousaurus looked superficially similar to its bipedal meat-eating ancestors, the experts believe it would have walked with a waddling gait and may have used its large talons for defence or for gripping on to branches.

The dinosaur may have shared its world with a host of other early Cretaceous dinosaurs, including giant, long-necked, plant-eating sauropods and early relatives of duck-billed herbivores, said the authors.

At 6.5 meters long, Suzhousaurus is the largest known therizinosaur from the early Cretaceous. “Previously, big therizinosaurs like this were known only from near the end of the age of dinosaurs,” said lead author of the study Daqing Li of the Third Geology and Mineral Resources Exploration Academy in Gansu, China.

“The beast is remarkable in that it is so large for such an early species of therizinosaur, indicating that a remarkable diversity of these bizarre animals were already present in the early Cretaceous,” commented James Kirkland, palaeontologist with the Utah Geological Survey in Salt Lake City.