The first reasonably complete skeleton of a meat-eating dinosaur from the final 60 million years of the age of dinosaurs in Europe, then mostly under water and reduced to islands, was described in the cover story of the August 31 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences magazine.

The fossiles were found in Romania and represent the most complete predator skeleton paleontologists have found in sediments from the end of the Mesozoic in Europe, according to the findings of a team of paleontologists from the University of Bucharest and the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH).

"We've all been waiting for something like this, and the wait has yielded an interesting surprise," the chair of the AMNH division of paleontology, Mark Norell, who is one of the authors of the research paper describing the fossil, said in a statement published by the museum on its website.

The new species has been named Balaur bondoc, meaning "stocky dragon" in archaic Romanian, and was unearthed in Romania by geologist and co-author Mátyás Vremir of the Transylvanian Museum Society.

"B. bondoc is heavy, with unexpectedly stocky limbs and fused bones. It shows just how unusual the fauna of the area was during the waning years of the dinosaur era," Norell said.

Balaur bondoc was a close relative of the velociraptor, made famous by the Jurassic Park films in the 1990s, but sported several notable differences.

"Its anatomy shows that it probably hunted in a different way than its less stocky relatives. Compared to Velociraptor, Balaur was probably more of a kickboxer than a sprinter, and it might have been able to take down larger animals than itself, as many carnivores do today," said Stephen Brusatte, a graduate student at Columbia University affiliated with the museum.

According to Zoltán Csiki of the University of Bucharest, the new species was "the size of an oversized turkey and unlike what we know of the large predators from other parts of the world at the same time period, like Tyrannosaurus or Carnotaurus. As European dinosaur faunas were known to be peculiar, we half-expected to find peculiar predators as well. But, as the first good record of these, Balaur surely exceeds our most daring expectations."

The fossils are not new, having been known for more than 10 years, but the morphology was "so weird we didn't have any idea where to fit them", he said.

The new fossil is described in and pictured on the cover of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The authors include Csiki, Vremir, Brusatte, and Norell, AMNH said.

The research was funded in part by the American Museum of Natural History, the National Science Foundation, Columbia University Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, the Romanian National University Research Council, Richard and Lynn Jaffe.