A tiny plant-eating dinosaur that was about the same size of a chicken and occupied what’s now northern Spain some 125 million years ago is baffling scientists.
The Early Cretaceous creature is described in a new paper published on Sunday in Papers in Paleontology.
The dinosaur, Foskeia pelendonum—named for the Greek words for “light” and “foraging”—was about half a meter long, with an unusual skull and teeth that suggest a “novel mode of feeding” behavior, the authors write.
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“Its anatomy is weird in precisely the kind of way that rewrites evolutionary trees,” said Penélope Cruzado-Caballero, an associate professor at the University of La Laguna in Spain and an author of the paper, in a statement.
The growth trajectory of F. pelendonum compared with an adult chicken.
Dieudonné et al., 2026
The new species could help paleontologists better understand the lineage of the ornithischians, or “bird-hipped” dinosaurs.
“From the beginning, we knew these bones were exceptional because of their minute size,” said Fidel Torcida Fernández-Baldor, a co-author of the new research and director of the Dinosaur Museum in Salas de los Infantes, Spain, who first discovered the fossils, in the same statement. “It is equally impressive how the study of this animal overturns global ideas on ornithopod dinosaur evolution.”