Fascinating discoveries were recently made by paleontologists digging in two completely seperate locations . . . one in the Gobi Desert, and the other at Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta, Canada.  The finds consisted of two fossilized heads of ornithomimid dinosaurs, and they resemble, strangely enough, the head of a duck.

One found in 1995 and the other in 1999, these peculiar reptiles, when living, probably looked something similar to an ostrich, according to experts. They were theropod dinosaurs, a group that also includes Tyrannosaurus Rex.

There are strange coincidences, however, that lead one to think that, perhaps, they are indeed just the heads of ducks (or an extinct species).  Made of keratin, just like a duck, these fossils also possess inside the mouth a sieve-like structure that would have been used for filter-feeding, just as in ducks.  Furthermore, the actual bodies of the specimens were not found, forcing one to guess as to how they really looked.

Regarding the long-debated issue of whether birds evolved from dinosaurs, these finds apparently don't lend any help.  Experts do not believe these dinosaurs were ancestors of ducks, so the search still continues for "the missing chain."

Duckbilled dinosaurs aren't anything new.  Other such species', like the hadrosaurs, also possessed bills, though were much larger than these recent fossil finds.  Simply put, a bill doesn't make a reptile a bird anymore then it does a duckbilled platypus.  A peculiar mammal quite unlike any other in the animal kingdom, the billed platypus is an inhabitant of Tasmania and southern and eastern Australia. 

Compare.  This is a vital key in paleontology . . . one which, only too often, is seemingly ignored.