A bird-like dinosaur nicknamed the "chicken from hell" was unveiled with an official scientific name on Wednesday by paleontologists from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, CNN reports.

The 7 feet tall and 500 pound "chicken from hell" dinosaur, so called by paleontologist Matt Lamanna, roamed western North America at the end of the Cretaceous period, from about 68 million to 66 million years ago, The Washington Post reports.

The "chicken from hell" dinosaur is now being called by the scientific name Anzu wyliei - "Anzu" is from a "feathered demon" mythological creature, CNN reports; "wyliei" is after the grandson of a patron of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, which acquired the fossils and where the research has been conducted.

Lamanna described the dinosaur to CNN as a 600-pound cross between an ostrich and a velociraptor.

"You might think this was a really, really weird-looking bird," Lamanna said. "... But, in fact, this was a very bird-like dinosaur ... with a really long bony tail, very large hands and really sharp claws."

"It would have been a cross between a chicken and a lizard," said Tyler Lyson, a paleontologist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, who excavated some of the fossils on his uncle's North Dakota ranch in 1999.

The fossils of three specimens of the new dinosaur were found in a sedimentary rock layer known as the Hell Creek Formation in three locations in North and South Dakota. The formation, the scientists said, helped inspire the nickname, The Washington Post reports.

But the dinosaur looks more like a creature from hell than a chicken. Anzu had a toothless beak and a crest on its skull like a rooster's comb, combined with long arms and sharp claws up to about 4 inches long. It apparently also had feathers over much of its body, Al Jazeera America reports.

"We have no evidence that it clucked or crowed," Lamanna said.

A replication of the dinosaur's skeleton is on display inside Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum.