The discovery is already helping paleontologists better understand the carcharodontosaurids. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire fiction series. Unauthorized use is prohibited.ĭiscovered in 2012 during field work partially funded by the National Geographic Society, the newly described animal has been named Meraxes gigas in a nod to Meraxes the dragon from George R.R. “They may have used the arms for reproductive behavior such as holding the female during mating or support themselves to stand back up after a break or a fall.” “I’m convinced that those proportionally tiny arms had some sort of function,” the new study’s lead author, paleontologist Juan Canale of the National University of Río Negro in Argentina, said in a press release. It therefore evolved its tiny arms independently, suggesting that having little forelimbs may have had more evolutionary advantages than previously thought. It belonged to a totally different group of dinosaurs known as the carcharodontosaurids, and it went extinct millions of years before T. Weighing more than four tons and stretching about 36 feet long, the newly discovered carnivore shared several physical traits with Tyrannosaurus rex, including an enormous head and tiny front armsīut the new species, described today in a study published in the journal Current Biology, is not closely related to tyrannosaurs. About 100 million years ago, a giant predatory dinosaur stalked what is now the Patagonian region of Argentina.
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