Deinocheirus Hid Behind Giant Arms

For almost 49 years, paleontologists knew Deinocheirus mostly from a pair of enormous arms found in Mongolia in 1965. Those forelimbs measured nearly 8 feet long, making them the longest known arms of any bipedal dinosaur, but the rest of the animal remained a mystery. Then in 2014, scientists finally described two much more complete skeletons, including fossils that had been looted by poachers before key pieces were recovered. The full animal turned out to be far stranger than anyone expected: a huge, hump-backed, duck-billed dinosaur unlike almost anything researchers had imagined.

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