This morning NPR has news of a newly identified dinosaur that lived 66 to 72 million years ago.

Bones of “the chicken from Hell” were first discovered more than a decade ago by Tyler Lyson at the Hell Creek formation in the Dakotas.  Specimens made their way into museum collections and intrigued Matt Lamanna at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Natural History who suspected this was an oviraptorosaurian theropod dinosaur (bird ancestor!) similar to those found in Asia.

Now Lamanna and his team — Hans-Dieter Sues, Emma Schachner and Tyler Lyson — have figured out what animal made these bones and published their findings in PLOS One.  It was Anzu wyliei, an enormous 500-pound feathered dinosaur with a bony crest on its head.

This illustration by the Carnegie’s Mark Klingler shows what it looked like.  Wow!

Read the full story here at NPR.

(Illustration of “the chicken from Hell” (Anzu wyliei) by Mark Klingler, linked from the NPR article)