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Bambiraptor

Bambiraptor is a 75 million year old bird-like dinosaur recently discovered by scientists at the University of Kansas, Yale University, and the University of New Orleans. When living, the negligible specimen would have stood no more than three feet off the ground, although this animal appears to be a juvenile. Because of its size and gentle appearance, it was christened Bambiraptor feinbergi, after the familiar Disney movie nature and the surname of the wealthy family who bought and donated the sample to the new Graves Museum of Natural History in Florida.

The Bambiraptor skeleton was exposed in 1995 by 14-year-old fossil hunter Wes Linster, who was looking for dinosaur bones with his parents near Glacier National Park in Montana. Linster told Time publication that he uncovered the skeleton on a tall hill and was amazed at his discovery. "I bolted downhill the hill to get my mom because I knew I shouldn't be messing with it", he said. The bones that Linster discovered on that hilltop led to the excavation of a skeleton that was around 95 percent complete. Because of its wholeness Florida Paleontology Institute Director Martin Sugar compared it to the 'Rosetta Stone', the stone tablet that enabled archaeologists to translate ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Yale paleontologist John Ostrom, who reintroduced the theory of dinosaur-bird evolution with his 1964 discovery of Deinonychus in Wyoming, decided, calling the specimen a "jewel", and telling reporters that the wholeness and undistorted qualities of the bones should help scientists further understand the dinosaur-bird link.

The specimen is at present housed at the American Museum of Natural History.