The last non-avian dinosaurs have been extinct for roughly the last 65 million years, so any kind of preserved dinosaur corpse—excluding bones—is considered a scientifically impossible phenomenon by all accounts. Still, it’s hard to explain the newly discovered corpse in India as anything but a dinosaur.
In the small city of Jaspur, India, an electrician was cleaning out an abandoned subway station when he stumbled across a partially preserved animal corpse
It seems impossible, but the animal looks a lot like a long-extinct species of dinosaur. It bears no real similarity to any other kind of animal, particularly ones that walk the earth today.
Measuring about 28 centimeters long (or a little over 2 feet), the creature looks to have walked primarily on its hind legs, with a body shape similar to the dromaeosaurus or the deinonychus.
The only problem, of course, is both creatures lived long before even the mass extinction of dinosaurs.
The dromaeosaurus, which predominantly roamed the Northern United States and the Canadian province of Alberta, lived over 70 million years ago—and the deinonychus, which is even older, was estimated to have lived over 100 million years ago
It was also significantly larger than the mysterious subway station corpse and didn’t live nearly as close to India as its distant Mongolian cousin, the velociraptor
Scientists are busy at work trying to figure out what the creature could possibly be, although it’s tough to tell so far.
One estimation is that the corpse is a more well-known, modern animal, such as a goat. The corpse in question, rather than mysteriously turning out to be a dinosaur, may be a genetically mutated goat or other four-legged animal, dying in infancy due to the genetic mutations that resulted in the body shape and presentation discovered.
The scientific community is holding off on posing any concrete answers until more testing has been done, but it’s hard not to get a little excited at the creature. With no preserved dinosaurs discovered in such a stumbled-across manner that weren’t in a fossilized state, this could be groundbreaking if it is, indeed, something from the long-distant past.
For now, though, it’s just a fascinating mystery.
Watch this fascinating footage below:
Credit: NTD
