It's a field in which one major discovery might be a career highlight.

But a Canadian scientist working in China has scored a paleontological hat trick in the past month alone, co-authoring three papers that detail the discovery of two new species of the extinct reptiles — including one with a striking resemblance to the roadrunner — and reveal a previously unknown feature of "feathered arms" in a birdlike dinosaur with the posture of a penguin.

Corwin Sullivan, an evolution expert raised in Ontario and B.C. and educated at the University of Toronto and University of Victoria, says the flurry of published studies is "mostly a coincidence of timing" but also reflects how China has emerged as the world's richest fossil hotbed — particularly when it comes to tracing the links between dinosaurs and birds.

Now a post-doctoral researcher with the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, Sullivan says numerous advances in research technologies and the quickening pace of knowledge-sharing via the Internet are helping scientists document discoveries like never before.

"As I'm sure is happening in many other academic fields, paleontology moves fast these days and the pace of discovery has increased well beyond what it was even a decade ago," he told Canwest News Service.

"That said, I do think I've done well to have three solid papers with my name on them come out inside a month," Sullivan added. "The spate won't continue at the same rate, but there will be a few more publications as the year goes on."

Sullivan was lead author of a study on a pivotal species of feathered dinosaur published in early March in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

The paper examined how the predator Deinonychus — described as a "close relative of birds" and depicted by illustrators in a penguin-like stance — must have moved its feather-covered arms in a way that foreshadowed the wing flexibility of dinosaurs' avian descendants.

The discovery showed how "some characteristics that biologists used to think of as distinctively avian — feathers and air sacs are other good examples — are actually quite deeply rooted" in theropod dinosaur evolution, Sullivan said at the time.

"It documents an important aspect of the transition to birds — the evolution of the functionally distinctive avian wrist," Sullivan told Canwest News Service.

That paper was followed by two publications in the journal Zootaxa later in March.

In the first, Sullivan and 10 other scientists from China, the U.S. and Britain identified a new species of dinosaur — Linheraptor exquisitus — based on an "exceptionally well-preserved, nearly complete skeleton" found in the Gobi Desert in northern China.

"It's a gorgeous specimen," Sullivan says.

The 2.5-metre-long, 25-kilogram species was described in a study summary as "a fast, agile predator that preyed on small horned dinosaurs" and possessed a "large 'killing claw' on the foot, which may have been used to capture prey."

Xu Xing, the manager of Sullivan's research unit at the Chinese academy, was lead author of the Linheraptor paper and hailed the "really beautiful fossil" — found in 2008 by two PhD students from Britain and the U.S. — and the light it has shed on several transitions in dinosaur anatomy.

Finally, Sullivan co-authored a second Zootaxa study identifying the new species Xixianykus zhangi — a diminutive dinosaur that stood just 50 centimetres tall and ran rapidly on two legs like a roadrunner.

Found in China's Henan province, the species is among the smallest dinosaurs ever documented and is believed to have preyed on social insects such as ants or termites by ripping apart fallen logs and other nests and feasting on the exposed colonies.

The incomplete fossil had a "relatively intact hind limb, which I was able to use — this was my main contribution to the paper — to draw some basic inferences about its locomotion," says Sullivan.

"When I looked at the limb proportions of Xixianykus I was surprised at how extreme they were," he says. "The lower part of the leg was highly elongated compared to the upper part, which is characteristic of running animals today — and there were a few other details that also suggested good running ability."

While his three-in-a-month publishing streak was a first, Sullivan has had a hand in several other notable fossil finds. Last year he co-authored a paper on the discovery of Limusaurus, a species that shed fresh light on "the problem of how the fingers of theropods shifted into a birdlike configuration, which has been a long-standing puzzle in dinosaur paleontology."

Sullivan was also involved in one of the world's most celebrated fossil discoveries of the past decade. He was part of a team of Harvard University and University of Chicago paleontologists that in 2004 unearthed Tiktaalik roseae, the remains of a "walking fish" found on Canada's Ellesmere Island that symbolizes the transition of animal life from water to land nearly 400 million years ago.