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An officer lifts the plaster jacket of a new Meraxes gigas dinosaur, in Las Campanas Canyon, 25kms southwest of Villa El Chocon, Neuquen Province, Argentina, on March 17, 2014.
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Paleontologists say they have discovered a new species of giant carnivorous dinosaur that had large heads and small arms, such as Tyrannosaurus rex.
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The researchers’ findings, published in the journal Current Biology, suggest that the tiny forelimbs were not an evolutionary coincidence, but rather gave apex predators a certain survival advantage.
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Meraxes gigas – named after the fictional dragon in the Game of Thrones book series – was excavated over four years on field expeditions in Argentina’s northern Patagonia region, starting with a skull found in 2012.
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The fossil remains are very well preserved. The skull was just over four feet (127 centimeters) long, while the entire animal would have been about 36 feet long, and weighed four metric tons.
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Its arms are two feet long, “so it’s literally half the length of the skull and the animal wouldn’t have been able to reach its mouth,” Makovicky said.
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Jakarta: Paleontologists say they have found a species dinosaur a new giant carnivore with a big head and small arms, like Tyrannosaurus rex.
The researchers’ findings, published in the journal Current Biology, suggest that the tiny forelimbs were not an evolutionary coincidence, but rather gave apex predators a certain survival advantage.
Meraxes gigas – named after the fictional dragon in the Game of Thrones book series – was excavated over four years on field expeditions in Argentina’s northern Patagonia region, starting with a skull found in 2012.
“We won the lottery and found it literally the first morning,” senior author Peter Makovicky of the University of Minnesota told AFP.
The fossil remains are very well preserved. The skull was just over four feet (127 centimeters) long, while the entire animal would have been about 36 feet long, and weighed four metric tons.
Its arms are two feet long, “so it’s literally half the length of the skull and the animal wouldn’t have been able to reach its mouth,” Makovicky said.
T. rex didn’t get its tiny arms from M. gigas. The latter went extinct 20 million years before the former appeared, and the two species are far apart on the evolutionary tree.
Instead, the authors believe the fact that tyrannosaurids, carcharodontosaurids — the Meraxes group — and a third species of giant predator called abelisaurids all evolved with small arms suggests a particular benefit.
Makovicky believes that as their head grew larger, it became the dominant tool of their predatory arsenal, taking on the function that the forelegs had in smaller species. AFP PHOTO/University of Minnesota/Juan Canale
(WWD)
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