A new dinosaur from Portugal is Europe’s largest-ever terrestrial predator and was the biggest carnivorous dinosaur of the Jurassic Period, according to paleontologists who studied its remains. The dinosaur, namedTorvosaurus gurneyi, measured close to 33 feet long and weighed over 2,200 pounds, according to a paper in the latest PLoS ONE. The predator was at the top of Europe’s terrestrial food chain roughly 150 million years ago. Photos: Oldest Dinosaur Nursery Found “The fauna of what is now Portugal was extremely diverse in the Late Jurassic,” paleontologist Octavio Mateus of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, and co-author of the study, said in a press release. “This new species of carnivorous dinosaur is adding a little more (to the) diversity of dinosaurs of Portugal. He added that the dinosaur lived at a time “when the Atlantic was well formed and Europe was an archipelago.” Fossils for the dinosaur were found north of what is now Lisbon. The upper jaw retains eleven of the dinosaur’s teeth, each of which measures about 4 inches long. The new dinosaur is the second known kind ofTorvosaurusand is the European equivalent ofTorvosaurus tannerifrom North America. Both species were discovered in rocks of the same geological age and lived in similar environments dominated by dinosaurs. Both might have been covered with proto-feathers, and both belonged to a two-legged dino group that gave rise to birds. The Portuguese dinosaur was a distant cousin of Tyrannosaurus rex[/i, and had more teeth thanT. tanneri.T. rexstill retains its “King of the Dinosaur Predators” title, though, as it was larger than both of theTorvosaurusbeasts. (The most complete skeleton for aT. rexsuggests it grew to about 40 feet long.)
Posted on: Tue, 18 Mar 2014 09:42:23 +0000
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