14 DAY TRIAL // According to a new study published in the June 28 issue of the journal Nature Communications, so-called parrot dinosaurs walked on all four legs during their youth.
The animals only switched to bipedalism later in life, after having put their adolescence behind them.
The parrot dinosaur, whose scientific name is Psittacosaurus, used to roam the Earth some 100 million years ago, during the Cretaceous.
Paleontologists were able to shed new light on how representatives of this species changed as they aged after analyzing the fossilized remains of specimens of various ages.
It appears that, up until they reached the age of four, the upper limbs of parrot dinosaurs developed at rather fast rates.
However, between the animals’ fourth and sixth year of life, their arm bones stopped growing and their lower limbs grew to a considerable extent. As a result, the dinosaurs had no choice except switch to bipedalism.
“These kinds of studies can also throw light on the evolution of a dinosaur like Psittacosaurus.”
“Having four-legged babies and juveniles suggests that at some time in their ancestry, both juveniles and adults were also four-legged, and Psittacosaurus and dinosaurs in general became secondarily bipedal,” Professor Mike Benton of the University of Bristol commented on these findings.