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INDONESIAN EYE, JAKARTA-A new species of dinosaur, with short arms such as Tyrannosaurus rex or T. rex was discovered by paleontologists in Argentina.
The fossil of a new species called Meraxes gigas was found in northern Patagonia, Argentina.
According to research published in the journal Current Biology recently, this ancient creature was 11 meters long and weighed more than 4 tons.
Quoted from CNN, Meraxes gigas is a carnivore from the Carcharodontosauridae dinosaur group that lived in the Cretaceous period, 145 million to 66 million years ago.
Many Carcharodontosauridae fossils have been found in the last 30 years, but not much is known about its skull, forearms, or legs. However, this changed with the discovery of M. gigas because of its intact fossils.
“For the first time we know a lot of detail about certain parts of the anatomy of this giant carnivorous dinosaur,” Juan Canale of the Ernesto Bachmann Museum of Paleontology, Neuquen, Argentina, told CNN.
The researchers found nearly intact forelimbs, which made it easier for researchers to conclude that M. gigas had small shoulders, much like T. rex.
But the team says M. gigas lived apart from T. rex and went extinct nearly 20 million years before T. rex walked the earth.
Canale said that although the two types of dinosaurs had small heads and shoulders, their bone structure was very different.
The ancestors of M. gigas had longer shoulders and smaller heads and their shoulders were important in the hunting process but changed over time.
Researchers don’t know whether this fossil is a male or female dinosaur.
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