Incisivosaurus

What it was like

Incisivosaurus was a small feathered dinosaur, an early relative of Oviraptor. It had a pair of large front teeth at the tip of its upper jaw, like the incisors of a rodent, and small, peg-like teeth behind them.

Those front teeth show wear, which suggests it gnawed or clipped tough plants, so it probably ate mostly plants, perhaps with some small animals.

Its world

It lived about 126 to 120 million years ago, in the Early Cretaceous, in what is now northeastern China. Its skull comes from the lowest layers of the Yixian Formation, which also produced Psittacosaurus, Sinosauropteryx and the early tyrannosaur Dilong.

How it was found

Xu and colleagues named Incisivosaurus in 2002, from a single skull. Its teeth were among the first signs that many dinosaurs in the line leading to birds were not strict meat eaters.