Don’t count your chickens before they hatch — especially if they're 11 feet long and weigh 600 pounds, like the "chicken from hell" dinosaur scientists introduced to the world on Wednesday.
The dinosaur lived about 66 million years ago, during the Cretaceous period and somewhat resembles a modern-day emu or cassowary — if an emu had 4-inch claws. Its main unappealing characteristics include those treacherous claws, toothless beak and feathered appearance. While the beast's fossils were discovered over a decade ago in the North and South Dakotas, scientists introduced its scientific name and analyzed it fully for the first time in the journal PLOS One on Wednesday.
The research paper, titled "A New Large-Bodied Oviraptorosaurian Theropod Dinosaur from the Latest Cretaceous of Western North America," describes what scientists had affectionately nicknamed the "chicken from hell," giving it a new, scientific name: Anzu wyliei. The name comes from a mashup of a mythical feathered demon and Wylie J. Tuttle, the son of a donor to the museum where the Anzu resides, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Penn., The Guardian reports.
See also: Scientists Discover 'Polar Bear' Tyrannosaur in Arctic
“It would look like a really absurd, stretched-out chicken,” paleontologist and report co-author Emma Schachner of the University of Utah told the Washington Post, partly explaining why scientists gave the creature the apt nickname.
Anzu, was discovered and identified from three skeletons found in the Dakotas, in an area known as Hell Creek. To date, it's the biggest oviraptorosaur found in North America. Its skeletons were found nearly complete, helping paint a picture of what the Caenagnathidae family, an oviraptorosaur subgroup, was like. Oviraptorosaurs, beaked dinosaurs with parrot-like skulls, also include the enormous, 26-foot long Gigantoraptor, discovered in Mongolia in 2005.

This illustration provided by the Carnegie Museum of Natural History on March 18, 2014 shows the dinosaur Anzu wyliei.
Image: Mark Klingler/Associated Press
“With the discovery of A. wyliei, we finally have the fossil evidence to show what this species looked like, and how it is related to other dinosaurs,” said Hans-Dieter Sues, a researcher on the team that found Anzu to the Smithsonian.
When asked why the scientists chose Anzu as its name instead of the Latin or Greek translation of its nickname, report co-author Matthew Lamanna said they were "ridiculously unpronounceable." "I thought that if I couldn't come up with a name that literally meant 'chicken from hell,' I could at least name it 'feathered demon,” Lamanna told the Associated Press.
Anzu wyliei lived in a hot and humid area, eating plants and maybe small animals. No word yet on what kind of roads it would've crossed or what sound it could've made.
Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.