Weird dinosaur with the longest claws of any known animal.
>With its three-foot-long claws, long, garish feathers and gangly, pot-bellied build, Therizinosaurus, the “reaping lizard,” is one of the most bizarre dinosaurs ever identified.
It’s often the case that a bizarre fossil discovery, especially of a 75-million-year-old dinosaur, can’t be fully understood without additional context. While Therizinosaurus was finally tagged as some kind of theropod dinosaur in 1970, it wasn’t until the discovery of the closely related Segnosaurus and Erlikosaurus (from elsewhere in Asia) that it was finally identified as a “segnosaurid,” a bizarre family of theropods possessing long arms, gangly necks, pot bellies, and a taste for vegetation rather than meat.
The most striking feature of Therizinosaurus was its claws—sharp, curved, three-foot-long appendages that looked like they could easily disembowel a hungry raptor or even a good-sized tyrannosaur. Not only are these the longest claws of any dinosaur (or reptile) yet identified, but they’re the longest claws of any animal in the history of life on earth—even exceeding the gigantic digits of the closely related Deinocheirus, the “terrible hand.”
Just how big was Therizinosaurus? It was hard to reach any conclusive size estimates just on the basis of its claws, but additional fossil discoveries in the 1970s helped paleontologists to reconstruct this dinosaur as a 33-foot-long, five-ton, bipedal behemoth. As such, Therizinosaurus is the largest identified therizinosaur, and it weighed only a few tons less than the roughly contemporary Tyrannosaurus Rex of North America (which pursued a completely different lifestyle).
