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Stand aside, tyrannosaurs, there is a new king of the Mesozoic world.
Paleontologists in Uzbekistan unearthed a 90-million-year-old rock on Wednesday containing the remains of a recently discovered dinosaur that once allegedly terrorized smaller species of tyrannosaurs: it’s the 30-foot-long carcharodontosaurus named the Ulughbegsaurus uzbekistanensis.
The new dinosaur, identified by a singular upper jaw and jagged teeth, was first revealed in Royal Society Open Science by University of Tsukba paleontologist Kohei Tanaka, University of Calgary paleontologist Darla Zelenitsky and their colleagues.
“It’s a new bone, and really just a part of a bone, but its importance far eclipses its appearance,” said University of Edinburgh paleontologist Stephen Brusatte, who commented on the find but didn’t did not participate in its discoveries.
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Zelenitsky goes on to predict that the newly discovered “shark-tooth lizards” were allosauroids that were natural predators of tyrannosaurs, limiting their population growth.
The remains were found in the Bissekty Formation, rock formations 90 to 92 million years old that buried the remains of a multitude of dinosaur species, including other small tyrannosaurs, allosauroids, and sauropods.
“The Bissekty Formation represents one of the best-known ecosystems in Europe and Asia in its time,” Zelenitsky said.
A Tyrannosaurus-rex predatory dinosaur model – archive photo.
A model of a Tyrannosaurus-rex predatory dinosaur – archive photo.
(Photo by Christophe Gateau / photo alliance via Getty Images)
One such tyrannosaurus found in the Bissekty formation includes Timurlengia, a 10-foot-long predator that would have conflicted with the Ulughbegsaurus.
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“There may have been a complex interaction between Ulughbegsaurus and other smaller predatory dinosaurs,” Zelenitsky added.
Other top predators from the same Mesozoic period have been found in a 96-million-year-old rock in southeast Utah, including another small Tyrannosaurus, named Moors, and a large carcharodontosaurus named Be careful.
It was only afterwards that these larger carcharodontosaurs, like the Ulughbegsaurus, left the area where the small tyrannosaurs grew up to become the larger and more well-known species.
In Lower Cretaceous China around 125 million years ago, for example, these large predators did not exist in environments to limit the growth of tyrannosaurs. This led to the development of the Yutyrannus, a tyrannosaurus 9 meters long.
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Paleontologists aren’t sure what led to the absence or fallout of carcharodontosaurs, a mystery that could one day be explained, as smaller predators are unlikely to suddenly overtake their larger counterparts.
“I think any discoveries we can make in or around the 90- to 80-million-year-old window can help shed light on this little-known interval of dinosaur-dominated ecosystems,” Zelenitsky detailed.
“Given that allosauroids held tyrannosaurs for so many tens of millions of years,” Brusatte added, “I can’t imagine tyrannosaurs suddenly figured out how to outperform allosauroids.”
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