Hesperonychus: A Cutie!

And makes a good house pet? (Unlike a Leviathan.) There is a report, “New North American Dinosaur Was Smaller Than Housecat” (posted 16 March 2009 at 05:53 PM ET), of a recently-discovered species of dinosaur on Live Science:

Weighing approximately 4 pounds (2 kilograms) and standing about a foot and a half tall (50 centimeters), Hesperonychus elizabethae resembled a miniature version of the bipedal predator Velociraptor, to which it was closely related. Hesperonychus walked on two legs and had razor-like claws and an enlarged sickle-shaped claw on its second toe. It had a slender build and slender head with dagger-like teeth. “It was half the size of a domestic cat and probably hunted and ate whatever it could for its size — insects, mammals, amphibians and maybe even baby dinosaurs,” said Nick Longrich, a paleontology research associate in the University of Calgary’s Department of Biological Sciences. “It probably spent most of its time close to the ground searching through the marshes and forests that characterized the area at the end of the Cretaceous.”

See the article for an artist’s rendering of the Hesperonychus.