Described dinosaur with shark teeth, ruler of land before the onset of Tyrannosaurus rex
Scientists have studied the fossil of a dinosaur that was terrified by land 90 million years ago.
From the dinosaur era, we remember as the top predator of the Tyrannosaurus rex (the tyrannical royal lizard). However, T. rex did not occur on Earth until 68 million to 66 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous era. He was one of the last living dinosaurs.
However, dinosaurs appeared on the planet 200 million years ago, and other members of this group have changed at the top of the food chain for tens of millions of years.
From 100 million to 90 million years ago, land was ruled by carcharodontosaurs, carnivorous dinosaurs with jaws full of tiny shark teeth. And among them is the newly described Ulughbegsaurus uzbekistanensis.
It was named after Ulugh Beg, a renowned astronomer, mathematician and sultan who lived in present-day Uzbekistan in the fifteenth century and made Samarkand one of the most important scientific centers of the Middle Ages. It was in the territory of present-day Uzbekistan 90 million years ago that the terrible Ulughbegsaurus lived and hunted.
A piece of this creature’s jawbone was found in the Uzbek desert Kyzylkum in the second half of the 1980s. However, it was not until the end of 2019 that paleobiologists picked it up from the collections of the Uzbek Museum and began to study it thoroughly. They published the results of their research in a journal Royal Society Open Science.
Part of the jaw of a ulughbegsaura. | zdroj: credit-Tanaka et al
Scientists have described Ulughbegsaura uzbekistanensise as an eight-meter-long dinosaur weighing about six tons. It was therefore comparable to Tyrannosaurem rexem. Measured by today’s animals, the length exceeded the African elephant and the weight of the bison or bison.
“Our study suggests that carcharodontosaurs were top predators ninety million years ago in Asia,” Kohei Tanaku, a professor of natural sciences at the University of Sugar, Japan, quoted Live Science as saying.
Discovery of Ulughbegsaura uzbekistanensise is the last known finding of a representative species of carcharodontosaurs. It dates back to the time when the first dinosaurs from the tyrannosaurid family began to appear on Earth, which later included Tyrannosaurus rex.
A piece of the jawbone was everything left of the Ulughbegsaur dinosaur. | zdroj: credit-Tanaka et al
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