While they may have faced extinction 66 million years ago, our collective fascination with dinosaurs has meant that iconic species, such as T.rex, Triceratops, and Stegosaurus, are just as, if not even more recognisable than animals living today, says Will Newton.
However, these weren’t the only dinosaurs that once called Earth ‘home’. There were hundreds more that, when compared to our childhood favourites, stand out - not because they were bigger, toothier, or fiercer, but because they were incredibly strange, even by dinosaur standards.
If at any point while reading this article you think, ‘this dinosaur looks too strange, it can’t possibly be real’, just remember that platypuses, pangolins, and blobfish are real-life animals and not the works of a child armed with a set of crayons and a vivid imagination. Mother Nature works in mysterious ways and has been creating weird (and wonderful) animals ever since life first emerged.
- The planet's weirdest animals: meet the weird freaks and oddballs of the natural world - including one that looks like it's wearing stripy pyjamas
- The ugliest animals in the world
From shaggy, sail-backed giants with rakes for hands to bird-like pipsqueaks with wings made of skin rather than feathers, here are 10 of the strangest dinosaurs that ever lived…
Weirdest dinosaurs in the world
Deinocheirus
Looking like a cross between a duck, a camel, and an extinct ground sloth, Deinocheirus is a particularly peculiar dinosaur whose size and bizarre mix of features belies its somewhat mundane lifestyle.
Instead of pursuing giant herbivorous dinosaurs across great plains like its meat-eating theropod cousins did, Deinocheirus spent most of its life wading in stagnant ponds. It’s thought it used its large, rake-like claws to dig and gather plants and its duck-like bill to filter any other small foodstuffs from water, including fish.
At 11m in length and nearly six-and-a-half tons in weight, Deinocheirus is the largest ornithomimosaur (ostrich-like dinosaur) currently known to science. It was discovered in 1965 in rocks belonging to the Nemegt Formation in Mongolia’s Gobi Desert. This rock formation is roughly 70 million years old and has yielded remains of many other types of dinosaurs, including ankylosaurs, sauropods, hadrosaurs, and tyrannosaurs.
Deinocheirus, like other ornithomimosaurs, was probably covered in shaggy, hair-like feathers and based on the structure of its caudal vertebrae it may have even sported an extravagant tail fan of bird-like feathers.
However, unlike other ornithomimosaurs Deinocheirus wasn’t particularly renowned for its speed. Its legs were relatively short and its back-end was very robust, suggesting it moved rather slowly.
This may have made it a target for large contemporary predators like Tarbosaurus - there’s evidence of bite marks on several Deinocheirus bones that have been attributed to such an attacker. That said, Deinocheirus had size on its side and fully grown would have had very few natural predators.
Ubirajara
This small, 1m-long dinosaur is not only strange in terms of its appearance, but also in terms of its discovery.
Initially described in a 2020 study, Ubirajara was later declared invalid after it became apparent that the fossils it was described from had been illegally exported from its country of origin, Brazil, back in 1995.
Ubirajara has since been repatriated and is now on display at the Plácido Cidade Nuvens Paleontology Museum in northeastern Brazil, but the study describing it and where it falls in the wider dinosaur family tree has not yet been re-published, shrouding it further in mystery.
Nevertheless, from photographs of the holotype specimen we know that Ubirajara was feathered and possessed never-before-seen spear-like feathers emerging from its shoulders. It’s this unique feature that prompted authors of the now withdrawn 2020 study to name it Ubirajara, which in the local Tupi language means ‘Lord of the Spear’.
Based on its appearance, Ubirajara has been informally placed in the Compsognathidae family - a group of small, carnivorous dinosaurs that were remarkably quick and agile and are thought to have hunted equally speedy lizards. It lived roughly 115 million years ago during the Early Cretaceous, a short time after its proposed sister species Sinosauropteryx from Mongolia lived.
Oryctodromeus
As a group, dinosaurs aren’t really known for burrowing. This is a behaviour most often associated with mammals and one of the often suggested reasons why they survived the asteroid-induced mass extinction 66 million years ago, while the non-avian dinosaurs didn’t.
However, there is a dinosaur that scientists are confident built and maintained burrows - Oryctodromeus. This labrador-sized animal lived in the Western United States during the Late Cretaceous (~100 million years ago) and belongs to a family of herbivorous, fast-running dinosaurs known as thescelosaurs.
Oryctodromeus was discovered in 2007 after paleontologists unearthed a fossilised burrow in southwestern Montana that contained the remains of three partial skeletons from an adult and two juveniles.
The burrow these dinosaurs were found entombed in closely matched the proportions of the adult specimen, suggesting it had dug out its own home rather than squatted in a burrow made by another animal. A closer examination of the burrow also revealed a pronounced s-bend, a feature some think Oryctodromeus may have deliberately crafted in order to make it harder for predators to enter its home.
Oryctodromeus is the first and so far only non-avian dinosaur that shows convincing evidence of burrowing behaviour. It’s not beyond the realms of possibility that there may have been more burrowing dinosaurs, and that some may have even weathered the initial fallout from the asteroid that wiped out the rest of their kin inside their burrows, only to ultimately face extinction years later.
Heterodontosaurus
No, this isn’t concept art of a genetically modified dinosaur from an upcoming Jurassic Park film, it’s a real-life dinosaur that lived in South Africa during the Early Jurassic, 200 to 190 million years ago.
Heterodontosaurus’ name means ‘different toothed lizard’ and it’s unique amongst other dinosaurs in that it possessed differently shaped gnashers.
In total, Heterodontosaurus had three types of teeth. In its upper jaws it had small, incisor-like teeth followed by long, canine-like fangs that protruded from both its upper and lower jaws. Behind these were a series of chisel-shaped cheek teeth that are thought to have done the majority of the work when it came to eating.
In fact, it’s thought Heterodontosaurus’ sharp front teeth played little role in feeding and were instead used for fighting others of its kind.
There has been a lot of debate surrounding Heterodontosaurus’ diet as a result of its unique dentition. Most palaeontologists agree that it was predominantly herbivorous and used its pointed beak and robust cheek teeth to pick at and grind up tough plant material. However, some have suggested it may have been omnivorous and used its fangs to subdue and kill small prey during high-speed hunts.
It’s believed Heterodontosaurus may have also been covered by hundreds of filamentous, feather-like structures, just like its close cousin Tianyulong. If so, it would have looked a lot like a crazed, two-legged hedgehog in life.
Spinosaurus
Few dinosaurs are quite as enigmatic as Spinosaurus - the poster child of ‘strange dinosaurs’. This giant, sail-backed theropod was originally discovered in 1912 and later described in 1915 based on the lower part of a jaw, a handful of vertebrae, and several, extraordinarily long neural spines, all found in western Egypt.
Spinosaurus’ peculiarity amongst other large, meat-eating theropods from the Late Cretaceous (~100-94 million years ago) was immediately apparent, but before more work was able to be done on reconstructing this strange dinosaur, the type material was destroyed during a British bombing raid of Munich in World War II.
Some more remains have since been discovered, though whether or not these belong to the originally described type species, Spinosaurus aegypticus, or another is unclear. This ambiguity in terms of fossils, not to mention its affinities with other dinosaurs, has meant that depictions of Spinosaurus have dramatically changed over time.
Once a terrestrial, upright-walking superpredator that may have rivalled T.rex in terms of ferocity, Spinosaurus is now widely thought to have been a specialist, semiaquatic predator that hunted fish. Its long, slender snout, huge dorsal sail, and paddle-shaped tail are all signs that it was built for a life in water, or at least around water. That said, exactly how much time it spent in water and whether it was actually capable of swimming and pursuing fish is heavily debated.
The discovery of more Spinosaurus material will no doubt shed some much needed light on this enigmatic dinosaur, but it will forever be one of, if not the strangest dinosaur of all time.
Parasaurolophus
As dinosaurs go, duck-billed hadrosaurs are amongst the most familiar and ‘normal-looking’. Some even refer to them as the ‘cows of the Cretaceous’ based on the fact that they were incredibly numerous, gathered in large herds, and - at least morphologically speaking - were rather unremarkable.
Not all hadrosaurs were drab, plant-eating dullards though; the 9m-long, five-ton Parasaurolophus from the Late Cretaceous (~75 million years ago) of western North America stands out from the rest of the hadrosaur crowd thanks to the large, snorkel-shaped crest that adorns its head.
This hollow structure connected to Parasaurolophus’ nasal cavity and is full of winding passages that, when air was blasted through them, created a unique sound.
In the 1980s, palaeontologist David Weishampel made a model of Parasaurolophus’ skull and blew into it. The noise reportedly sounded like that made by a crumhorn - a Renaissance-aged wind instrument that sounds a little bit like how you’d imagine a goose attempting to play a vuvuzela would sound…
Aside from its bulk, Parasaurolophus didn’t have much else going for it in terms of protection, so scientists think it may have weaponised its unique honk and used it to deter predators.
A lone Parasaurolophus honking may have been enough to make a hungry tyrannosaur think twice before approaching. A herd of honking Parasaurolophus, on the other hand, may have produced a honk loud enough to drive said predator away from its hunting grounds entirely.
Miragaia
Stegosaurs aren’t exactly known for their long necks, so when scientists discovered remains of an unusual, long-necked species in 150-million-year-old rocks from Portugal back in 1999 they were left scratching their heads.
In total, Miragaia has 17 neck vertebrae, which is more than most sauropods do - a group of dinosaurs renowned for their incredibly long necks. This discovery went against the long-held view that stegosaurs were solely low browsing herbivores with short necks, suggesting that some - Miragaia at least - were capable of reaching leaves from the tops of tall shrubs and trees.
Miragaia, like its cousin Stegosaurus, is also covered in plates and spikes. While it may be half the size of its more recognisable relative, it’s arguably ‘spikier’ and has even longer tail spines.
Last year, scientists analysed Miragaia’s tail and concluded that it was capable of generating enough speed and pressure to inflict serious injuries on potential predators. However, its tail spines, while longer than Stegosaurus’, were found to be less robust, meaning Miragaia’s primary weapon was somewhat of a glass cannon that may have broken if it was swung too haphazardly.
There were several bloodthirsty predators that roamed Portugal at the same time as Miragaia, including Allosaurus, Ceratosaurus, and Torvosaurus, but just how often they hassled this spiky stegosaur is unknown.
Brachytrachelopan
From a long-necked species of a typically short-necked dinosaur to a short-necked species of a typically long-necked dinosaur, this is Brachytrachelopan - a diminutive sauropod that could have comfortably worn a turtleneck sweater.
Standing just over 3m tall, measuring 11m in length, and weighing in at five tons, Brachytrachelopan was indeed small by sauropod standards, but it’s its incredibly short neck that makes it stand out from other sauropods
From the base of its skull to its shoulders, Brachytrachelopan’s neck measures only 2m, making it the shortest of any known sauropod. Its neck is also 40% shorter than those of other dicraeosaurids - a family of sauropods that went against group norms and, over time, evolved shorter and shorter necks.
Not only was Brachytrachelopan’s neck short, it was inflexible too. This has led scientists to suggest that it primarily ate plants that grew low to the ground and maxed out at heights of 1-2m.
Brachytrachelopan lived in Argentina during the Late Jurassic (from 160 to 150 million years ago). Interestingly, this is the same place where, roughly 50 million years later, the largest known sauropod (and the largest known terrestrial animal of all time) also lived - Argentinosaurus.
While it may be the largest sauropod in terms of height, standing more than 20m tall, Argentinosaurus doesn’t hold the title of the ‘longest-necked sauropod’; that title goes to Mamenchisaurus from China, which has an abnormally long neck measuring up to 15m.
Liaoningosaurus
Ankylosaurs are already quite strange; most are heavily-built, slow-moving herbivorous tanks that resemble giant armadillos. Now imagine an ankylosaur that was roughly half the size of an armadillo (~30cm-long), dined on fish, and spent a lot of its time swimming.
This bizarre ankylosaur is known as Liaoningosaurus. It lived during the Early Cretaceous (from 125 to 119 million years ago) and was discovered in the early 2000s in northeastern China.
Since its discovery, partial skeletons of 20 Liaoningosaurus have been found, one of which was found with preserved gut contents that suggest it may have eaten fish. A closer look at Liaoningosaurus’ teeth also reveal fork-like ridges on the crowns of its cheek teeth - a clear sign that it was carnivorous, say researchers.
Further studies of its skeleton have put forward evidence to suggest that it may have been partially aquatic, such as a bony belly plate. This may have served a similar function to a turtle’s plastron and protected Liaoningosaurus from underwater attackers, as well as rough substrates.
Not everyone agrees with this interpretation of Liaoningosaurus’ lifestyle, and some even argue that it’s not a valid species; rather a juvenile form of another known species of ankylosaur - Chuanqilong.
Yi Qi
This tiny, winged dinosaur from the Late Jurassic (around 160 million years ago) is so strange that the word ‘strange’ literally makes up half of its name - qi meaning ‘strange’ in Mandarin and yi meaning ‘wing’.
The first and so far only Yi Qi specimen was discovered in a quarry near Mutoudeng, North China, by a local farmer, and later sold to the Shandong Tianyu Museum of Nature in 2007.
After careful preparation of the fossil, museum staff uncovered remains of fluffy feathers, adding Yi Qi to the growing list of feathered dinosaurs. They also found small patches of wrinkled skin between Yi Qi’s fingers and the bones in its arms. This suggests its wings were made up by a membrane of skin, like the wings of pterosaurs and bats.
Yi Qi isn’t the only winged dinosaur, Archaeopteryx, Microraptor, and Anchiornis are all similarly small, winged dinosaurs, but it is the only one we currently know of that had membranous wings.
It’s unclear exactly how competent a flyer Yi Qi was, but the lack of large pectoral muscles suggest it probably wasn’t capable of flapping flight. Instead, it’s thought Yi Qi was a specialised glider that soared from tree to tree as it hunted small, flying insects.
- Could any dinosaurs fly? Probably fewer than you think...
- How many species of dinosaurs were there?
- Why did dinosaurs have horns and spikes?
- What were the fastest dinosaurs – and just how fast were they? Meet 10 prehistoric speed machines
- Weirdest fossils ever discovered: These bizarre prehistoric oddities will have you scratching your head
