Scientists have discovered a 26-foot-long dinosaur with shark teeth that ruled the food chain before T. rex

• Scientists have discovered a new species of dinosaur that lived around 90 million years ago.

• It was about 26 feet long and weighed over a ton.

• It would have been the largest carnivorous predator in this ecosystem at the time, the scientists said.

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Scientists have found a previously unknown 26-foot-long dinosaur that ruled the food chain before T. rex.

The study, a collaboration between the University of Calgary in Canada and Tsukuba University in Japan, was published Tuesday in the peer-reviewed journal Royal Society Open Science.

The Ulughbegsaurus uzbekistanensis (pronounced oo-LOOG-bek-SAW-rus, according to CBS News) was a carnivorous dinosaur that is believed to have roamed Central Asia over 90 million years ago, during the late Cretaceous period.

It is said to have dominated other predators at the time, including the Tyrannosaurus, which was much smaller than T. rex, which appeared around 7 million years later.

Scientists estimated the Ulughbegsaurus to be around 26 feet long, according to a statement from the University of Tsukuba. It also weighed over 1,000 kilograms (1.1 tonnes), according to the study.

“It would have been the biggest carnivorous predator in the ecosystem at that time,” said Darla Zelenitsky, associate professor of dinosaur paleobiology at the University of Calgary and one of the study’s authors, according to CBS News.

The Ulughbegsaurus also had shark teeth, CBS News reported, with Zelenitsky calling the find “the latest occurrence of one of these shark-toothed dinosaurs.”

The dinosaur was a type of carcharodontosaurus, a group of dinosaurs in which there are only two other known species. The Ulughbegsaurus was named after Ulugh Beg, a sultan and astronomer who lived in the area in the 1400s.

The bone fragments and teeth that led to the discovery of the new dinosaur were unearthed in the Kyzylkum Desert in Uzbekistan in the 1980s, CBS News reported.

But Kohei Tanaka, a professor at Tsukuba University who led the study, was the first to realize the pieces belonged to an undiscovered species, according to CBS News.

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