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| A reconstructed skeleton of Qijianglong, seen above, is now on display in Qijiang Museum in China |
A dinosaur with a long serpent-like neck that resembles a traditional Chinese dragon has been discovered by construction workers in southern China.
The 49 feet (15 metres) long dinosaur lived around 160 million years ago during the Late Jurassic period.
It was discovered by a construction workers digging in Qijiang City, in China, when they hit a series or large neck vertebrae that were stretched out in the ground.
Palaeontologists who have reconstructed the skeleton say that the enormous neck accounts for up to half of the length of the animal.
They have now named the new dinosaur Qijianglong, which means dragon of Qijiang, after the distinctive serpentine dragons depicted in Chinese legends.Most long-necked dinosaurs, or sauropods, have necks that only measure about one third of their body length.
Scientists have also speculated whether discoveries of other similar fossils in the past may have led to the legends of the distinctive serpent-like dragons that persist through out China.
Tetsuto Miyashita, one of the scientists at the University of Alberta who studied the fossil, said it was extremely unusual to find an animal with its neck in tact.
He said: 'It is rare to find a head and neck of a long-necked dinosaur together because the head is so small and easily detached after the animal dies.
'Qijianglong is a cool animal. If you imagine a big animal that is half neck, you can see that evolution can do quite extraordinary things.
'I wonder if the ancient Chinese stumbled upon a skeleton of a long-necked dinosaur like Qijianglong and pictured that mythical creature.'
The new species is thought to belong to a group of dinosaurs called mamenchisaurids, plant eating dinosaurs found through out Asia with particularly long necks.
Unlike others in the group, however, Qijianglong appears to have had air pockets within the huge bones in its vertebrae.
This would have meant that the animal's neck was relatively lightweight despite its huge size.
Unlike the mythical dragons in China, however, the neck would also have been relatively stiff. The scientists studying the fossil found that the bones of the vertebrae had interlocking joints, meaning it could bend up and down but was unable to move side to side much.
This stiffness could have meant that the creature was limited in the food it could access.
Qijianglong was also far from being the largest mamenchisaurid - the first of the group found in 1952 called Mamenchisaurus reached up to 115 feet (35m) in length.
Mr Miyashita, a PhD student working with palaeontologistofessor Philip Currie at the University of Alberta, said the new discovery, which was first unearthed in 2006, could help provide new details about why these dinosaurs evolved such long necks.
Their study is published in the Journal of Vertebrate Palaeontology.
He said: 'Qijianglong shows that long-necked dinosaurs diversified in unique ways in Asia during Jurassic times—something very special was going on in that continent.
'Nowhere else we can find dinosaurs with longer necks than those in China.
'The new dinosaur tells us that these extreme species thrived in isolation from the rest of the world.
'It is still a mystery why mamenchisaurids did not migrate to other continents.'
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| Qijianglong, seen here in an artists impression being chased by two carnivorous dinosaurs lived around 160 million years ago in southern China. Its name means Dragon of Qijiang, due to its long serpentine neck |
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| Serpentine dragons have become a popular part of traditional Chinese culture and celebration. Early discoveries of fossils similar to Qijianglong could have started the legends about these mythical creatures Culled from DAILY MAIL Musoke Musa Waheed, Djessy Makaya, Edward Ndemo Matureti and 70 others like this. |
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