A NEW dinosaur find has revealed that blockbuster films like Jurassic World are way out in their depictions of the prehistoric beasts.

A team from Edinburgh working with Chinese palaeontologists has unearthed a species of feathered dinosaur from 125 million years ago.

Named Zhenyuanlong, it is the biggest dinosaur ever found to have proper wings and is a close cousin of the Velociraptors shown in Jurassic Park and Jurassic World.

However while the Velociraptors in the film are scaly, green raptors without feathers, the remarkably well-preserved fossil found in China shows this is quite wrong.

“This new dinosaur is one of the closest cousins of the Velociraptor, but it looks just like a bird. It’s a dinosaur with huge wings made up of quill pen feathers, just like an eagle or a vulture,” said Dr Steve Brusatte, of the University of Edinburgh’s School of GeoSciences. “The movies have it wrong – this is what Velociraptors would have looked like too.”

While scientists have known for some time that many species of dinosaur had feathers, most of the ones that have been discovered were covered with simple filaments that looked more like hair than modern bird feathers.

The newly identified fossil, found in Liaoning Province, shows bird-like wings made of quill feathers.

Researchers say its wings – which are oddly short compared with other dinosaurs in the same family – consisted of multiple layers of large feathers. They found that the species’ feathers were complex structures made up of fine branches stemming from a central shaft.

This latest discovery suggests that winged dinosaurs with larger and more complex feathers were more diverse than previously thought.

The species belonged to a family of feathered carnivores that was widespread during the Cretaceous Period and lived around 125 million years ago.

Investigations show that the dinosaurs grew to more than five feet in length but despite having bird-like wings it probably could not fly, at least not using the same type of powerful muscle-driven flight as modern birds.

“It’s a pretty cool dinosaur so we’re really excited about it,” said Brusatte. “It is one of the coolest I have ever worked on as it is on the cusp of becoming a bird and is a very close cousin of the famous one from Jurassic World although the movie still showed Velociraptor without feathers, the way they would have been depicted 50 years ago. This is a perfect example of what they would have looked like so for a lot of people that saw the film this will be quite a revelation.

“Zhenyuanlong is not as big as a T.rex but is it is the biggest with wings that we have found and the wow factor is that it is such a beautiful fossil and so wonderfully preserved.”

The mystery is what the wings were for as they are too short to support such a big body in flight.

“The other ones with complex feathers have very long wings like the birds of today and are quite small while this one is the size of a very big dog,” Brusatte explained. “What makes it unusual is its short wings. It’s really strange and raises the question of what the dinosaurs were doing with them. Maybe they were gliding around, maybe they were protecting their eggs, or maybe they were using them for display in the way a peacock does. It is a real mystery for it to look so much like a bird but to be that big and have short wings.”

Professor Junchang Lü, of the Institute of Geology, Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences, who led the study, said: “The western part of Liaoning Province in China is one of the most famous places in the world for finding dinosaurs.

The first feathered dinosaurs were found here and now our discovery of Zhenyuanlong indicates that there is an even higher diversity of feathered dinosaurs than we thought. It’s amazing that new feathered dinosaurs are still being found.”

The study is published today in the journal Scientific Reports.