And as long as the top predator remains healthy, no other creature will prey on it. Such an apex - or top - predator usually is so tough that no other creature attempts to tackle it. Some predator usually dominates every ecosystem.
This absence of large predators didn’t make much sense, says Zanno. But because fossils of dinosaurs closely related to Siats did have remnants of dinofuzz, scientists suspect Siats too may have worn such a feathery jacket. It is depicted with a coat of protofeathers, which paleontologists sometimes call “dinofuzz.” Fossils of Siats showed no sign of such protofeathers. This multi-ton dinosaur ruled western North America almost 100 million years ago. 22 in Nature Communications.īefore researchers dug up the remains of Siats, no large predator was known to live in western North America between 110 million years ago and about 80 million years ago (when tyrannosaur ancestors of T. She and her co-workers announced the new allosaur species in a paper. She’s a vertebrate paleontologist at the North Carolina Museum of Natural History in Raleigh. Its discovery helps fill a large and mysterious gap in the fossil record, notes Lindsay Zanno. meekerorum ruled what is now western North America about 98.5 million years ago. Named for its best known species - Allosaurus - these carnivores come from a different branch of the dinosaur family tree than tyrannosaurs. But Siats belonged to a different family, the allosaurs. rex and its tyrannosaur kin, Siats walked on two legs. That’s where the researchers who describe the Siats fossils worked when they first unearthed its bones in Utah.) (It has sponsored research by young paleontologists working at the Field Museum in Chicago. The new dino’s species name honors the Meeker family. Its genus name comes from the native American Ute language, where tribal legend describes a man-eating monster named Siats. Scientists call the new dino Siats meekerorum (SEE-atch ME kur OR um). That should have kept them small and on the run. This newfound predator may have preyed on T. Now, the discovery of a new meat eater may offer some answers. Yet scientists have wondered why its ancestors remained relatively small for millions of years.
Some 65 million years ago, this 12-meter (40-foot) long meat-eating dinosaur chomped its prey using teeth the size of bananas. Tyrannosaurus rex was one of the most fearsome creatures to walk the planet.