The real surprise, though, came when researchers realized that Alnashetri wasn’t a highly specialized, late-stage Alvarezsauroid. Instead, despite living in the Late Cretaceous, it occupied an early-branching position among earlier, basal members of the clade.
This combination of tiny size and early-branching status fundamentally breaks our previous model of how these animals evolved. If the miniaturization of Alvarezsauroids was strictly tied to their lifestyle as stubby-armed insect-eaters, an early-diverging species like Alnashetri should have some transitional features on a steady, clade-wide march toward that extreme endpoint. But it didn’t look that way.
“It’s a very long-limbed animal, so it was probably fairly fast. My best analogy would be something like a roadrunner from the American West,” Makovicky said.
Late Alvarezsaurids had tiny, robust forelimbs that were less than half the length of their femurs. Alnashetri, though, sported comparatively long forelimbs that were 61 percent of the length of its entire hindlimb. While it had three-fingered hands with a robust first digit, a hallmark of its group, it still retained slender second and third digits, unlike its later cousins.
Other features that challenge the established evolutionary model of miniature dinosaurs are Alnashetri’s jaws and teeth. Its dentition features non-serrated teeth set into sockets, but importantly, these teeth are not extremely small, as they were in the late Alvarezsaurids like Shuvuuia or Jaculinykus. “This decoupled the evolution of small body size from anatomical specializations,” Makovicky explained.
The team concluded that extreme miniaturization in Alvarezsaurids did not necessarily co-evolve with either the evolution of smaller arms more suitable for digging or small teeth built for crushing ants and/or termites. Instead of a clade-wide trend where the entire lineage steadily shrank over time, a new evolutionary model that includes Alnashetri suggests that Alvarezsaurid body mass fluctuated repeatedly. Alnashetri, it turns out, achieved its 700-gram frame independently from the other, highly specialized alvarezsaurid species.
