13-foot dinosaur raptor bones unveiled

Five years after their discovery, the bones of a 7-foot-tall, 13-foot long new raptor dinosaur have been unveiled at the University of Utah.

The creature was also armed with sickle-like claws and covered with feathers, and date back 75 million years, said Scott Sampson, chief curator of the Utah Museum of Natural History.

Only about 7 percent of the fossil was recovered, but included the feet, and were enough to allow reconstruction and show the raptor was about twice as large as most other species of the variety, Sampson told the Salt Lake City Deseret.

The name "Hagryphus giganteus" means "giant four-footed, bird-like god of the western desert," said Lindsay Zanno, a graduate student at the university who named it and is the lead author of a paper describing the animal.

The paper was published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Copyright 2006 by United Press International