Chinese Paleontologists Create Full Rendering of Dinosaur Walking on Two Feet

An artist’s rendering of Auroraceratops. (Robert Walters)
An artist’s rendering of Auroraceratops. (Robert Walters)
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Chinese Paleontologists Create Full Rendering of Dinosaur Walking on Two Feet

An artist’s rendering of Auroraceratops. (Robert Walters)
An artist’s rendering of Auroraceratops. (Robert Walters)

Paleontologists have created a full rendering of a dinosaur walking on two feet.

The involved paleontologists managed to complete their rendering based on a series of articles appearing as Memoir in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology on July 8.

The Auroraceratops was one of many dinosaur species known from scant remains. It was named in 2005 based upon a single skull from the Gobi Desert in northwestern China.

But, in the intervening years, scientists have recovered fossils from more than 80 individual Auroraceratops, bringing this small-bodied plant-eater into one of the few very early horned dinosaurs known from complete skeletons.

In the new Memoir, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Gansu Agricultural University, described the anatomy and evolution of Auroraceratops.

Their analysis places Auroraceratops, which lived roughly 115 million years ago, as an early member of the group Ceratopsia, or horned dinosaurs, the same group to which Triceratops belongs.

In contrast to Triceratops, Auroraceratops is small, approximately 49 inches (1.25 meters) in length and 17 inches (44 cm) tall, weighing on average 34 pounds (15.5 kilograms).

While Auroraceratops has a short frill and beak that characterize it as a horned dinosaur, it lacks the "true" horns and extensive cranial ornamentation of Triceratops.

The paleontologists also provided a more detailed description, saying the Auroraceratops preserves multiple features of the skeleton, like a curved femur and long, thin claws that are unambiguously associated with walking bipedally.

Eric Morschhauser, head of the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, said: "This rendering can now provide us with a better picture of the starting point for the changes between bipedal and quadrupedal dinosaurs."

"Before this rendering, we had to rely on Psittacosaurus for our picture of what the last bipedal dinosaur looked like,” he added.



German Zoo Kills 12 Baboons That It Didn’t Have Enough Space to House, Despite Protests

 29 July 2025, Nuremberg: A demonstrator from Animal Rebellion is arrested by the police and the zoo's security service after entering the grounds of Nuremberg Zoo. (dpa)
29 July 2025, Nuremberg: A demonstrator from Animal Rebellion is arrested by the police and the zoo's security service after entering the grounds of Nuremberg Zoo. (dpa)
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German Zoo Kills 12 Baboons That It Didn’t Have Enough Space to House, Despite Protests

 29 July 2025, Nuremberg: A demonstrator from Animal Rebellion is arrested by the police and the zoo's security service after entering the grounds of Nuremberg Zoo. (dpa)
29 July 2025, Nuremberg: A demonstrator from Animal Rebellion is arrested by the police and the zoo's security service after entering the grounds of Nuremberg Zoo. (dpa)

A zoo in the German city of Nuremberg said it killed 12 baboons on Tuesday despite protests, capping a saga rooted in concerns that the zoo had too little space to house a growing group of the animals.

The Tiergarten Nürnberg Zoo first announced plans to kill baboons it didn't have space for in February 2024. It has said that it examined offers to take in some of the animals but was unable to make any of them work.

The plans drew criticism from animal rights groups. They also drew protests at the zoo, which said on Monday that it would have to start preparing to kill baboons. On Tuesday morning, it announced that it was closing for the day for unspecified "operational reasons.”

On Tuesday afternoon, police said several activists forced their way into the grounds, a few of them gluing themselves to the ground before being detained.

Shortly afterward, the zoo said it had killed 12 baboons, German news agency dpa reported. Further details weren’t immediately available. Animal rights groups said they planned to file a criminal complaint.

The zoo's population of Guinea baboons had grown to 43 and was too big for a house built in the late 2000s for 25 animals plus their young, leading to more conflicts among the animals.

The zoo has said it did take steps in the past to address the issue, with 16 baboons moving to zoos in Paris and China since 2011. But those zoos, and another in Spain to which baboons were previously sent, had reached their own capacity. An attempt at contraception was abandoned several years ago after failing to produce the desired results.

Animals are regularly euthanized in European zoos for a variety of reasons. Some past cases have caused an outcry; for example, one in 2014 in which Copenhagen Zoo killed a healthy 2-year-old giraffe, butchered its carcass in front of a crowd that included children and then fed it to lions.