Dinosaur discovered with a crocodile in its jaws named as new species

A dinosaur that will have been one of many fiercest of the Cretaceous interval has been excavated in South America – with an extinct crocodile’s leg in its jaws.

The stays of the dinosaur, named Joaquinraptor casali – a species of megaraptor that’s new to science – have been found within the headwaters of the Rio Chico river in Patagonia, Argentina, in 2019. It is believed that it lived simply earlier than the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs, 66 million years in the past.

Now, Lucio Ibiricu on the National Scientific and Technical Research Council in Chubut, Argentina, and his colleagues have studied the fossil intimately, and have been shocked by what they discovered within the mouth of the near-complete cranium.

“The humerus, or legbone, of an extinct crocodile relative was between the jaws of Joaquinraptor and directly in contact with the teeth,” says Ibiricu. “This discovery is suggesting, though not proving, that the new megaraptor may have been eating the crocodyliform [the clade that modern crocodiles belong to] when it died.”

The researchers are nonetheless learning the crocodile’s humerus to find out how huge it might have been, however preliminary work suggests it was giant, says Ibiricu.

In addition to recovering a lot of the dinosaur’s cranium, the group additionally excavated its vertebrae, toes, two claws, and an arm, leg and hand. The thumb claw, which is the scale of a human forearm, would have been in a position to tear open the comfortable tissue of its prey, says Ibiricu.

Other megaraptoran fossils have been present in Asia, Australia and elsewhere in South America, however J. casali is the primary to be discovered by scientists that lived so near the tip of the Cretaceous interval and, additionally, probably the most full.

The group decided the dinosaur would have been at the least 19 years outdated when it died, primarily based on the microstructure of its tibia. It additionally would have been about 7 metres lengthy and weighed at the least a tonne.

While Tyrannosaurus rex would have been bigger and had an even bigger head, J. casali had bigger, extra muscular arms, says Ibiricu. But each would in all probability have been the apex predators of their respective environments, he says.

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