Laura Moorcroft contacted a nearby zoo and vet after making the puzzling discovery in her garden, saying she “immediately thought it was of a dinosaur”.
A couple have puzzled animal experts when they find a mysterious claw in their garden outside their home in Wales.
Laura Moorcroft from Buckley, Flintshire near Liverpool, ‘immediately thought it was of a dinosaur’ when she and her husband discovered the remains.
She said: “My husband and I had just come back from a walk and he noticed it on the grass. It looks prehistoric to us – a scaly lizard claw.
“We’re huge Jurassic Park fans so immediately thought it was of a dinosaur, I mean, it looks a lot like a lizard, doesn’t it?”
By sharing her photo online, Laura sparked speculation from the local community. Some said it was from a bird or fowl, but others suspected something reptilian like an alligator, crocodile or turtle.
“One said it was like a pheasant and the other a turkey, so we’re still in the dark,” Laura said.
She added: “We have a surveillance camera, but it was a bit too far in the garden to capture anything, so it remains a mystery. I like our guess of a velociraptor (a small dinosaur) the best; I love that people had the same idea.
“I saw that someone thought it was a Gremlin! We didn’t think something like that would get anyone’s attention,” she said of the online responses to her picture.
Modern birds are descended from theropods, a group that includes raptors and Tyrannosaurus rex, according to Scientific American.
Arkhat Abzhanov, a biologist at Harvard University, said: “Early birds were almost identical to late velociraptor embryos.”
Unlike their movie counterpart, the actual velociraptors were equally feathered and about the same size as turkeys.
