Ginormous Claws Found in The Gobi Desert Belong to a Never-Before-Seen Species

These claws were made for grabbing. (Masato Hattori/Kobayashi et al., iScience, 2025)A newly discovered species of feathered, bipedal dinosaur with "exceptionally preserved and atypical hands" had just two fingers, each one tipped with a gigantic, claw-like talon.A remarkable fossil specimen found in southeastern Mongolia gave researchers a clear idea of what the claws would have looked like in real life, with their keratin sheath still clearly visible, extending the bones into wicked talons.In their published study, a team led by paleontologist Yoshitsugu Kobayashi from Hokkaido University in Japan analyzed the fossils' appearance, similarities to relatives, and geological context to determine where to place this dinosaur in our records.They've named it Duonychus tsogtbaatari, with a genus that means 'two claws' in Greek, and a species name honoring Mongolian paleontologist Khishigjav Tsogtbaatar.The fossil was dug out of a Cretaceous sedimentary deposit in the Gobi Desert by a team o...