MOROCCO DISCOVERS TWO NEW DINOSAUR FOSSILS BELONGING TO THE ‘COUSINS OF T-REX’

FILE PHOTO

Sat 26 August 2023:

The remains of two new dinosaur species have been unearthed in northern Morocco, belonging to the Abelisauridae, a family of carnivorous dinosaurs, making them “primitive cousins” of the Tyrannosaurus, reports Phys.org. The pair “had short bulldog snouts and even shorter arms,” than the famous apex predator popularly known as “the king of the dinosaurs,” or T-Rex.

The discoveries made just outside of Casablanca are believed to be counterparts to the tyrannosaurs of the Northern Hemisphere and lived at the end of the Cretaceous period. The finds “show that dinosaurs were diverse in Africa just before their mass extinction by an asteroid 66 million years ago,” the report said.

One of the species, found near the town of Sidi Daoui was represented by a foot bone from a predator about eight feet (2.5 metres) long, while the other, discovered in Sidi Chennane, is the shin bone of a carnivore that grew to around 15 feet (five metres) long.

New carnivorous dinosaurs from the late Maastrichtian (66 Mya) of Morocco. Three different species of abelisaurid, short-snouted, short-armed cousins of the tyrannosaurs, appear to coexist just before the asteroid hit. https://t.co/0NNKhVe13I pic.twitter.com/eaGuBKnqih

— Nick Longrich (@NickLongrich) August 23, 2023

According to Dr Nick Longrich, from the Milner Centre for Evolution at the University of Bath who led the study: “What’s surprising here is that these are marine beds. It’s a shallow, tropical sea full of plesiosaurs, mosasaurs and sharks. It’s not exactly a place you’d expect to find a lot of dinosaurs. But we’re finding them.” The team’s findings have been published in Cretaceous Research.

“The end of the Cretaceous in western North America definitely seems to become less diverse at the end,” said Longrich. “But that’s just one small part of the world. It’s not clear that you can generalise from the dinosaurs of Wyoming and Montana to the whole world.”

Nour-Eddine Jalil, a professor at the Natural History Museum and a researcher at Universite Cadi Ayyad in Morocco, who was a co-author on the paper, said: “When T. rex reigned as a megapredator in North America, abelisaurs sat at the top of the food chains in North Africa.”

“The dinosaur remains, despite their rarity, give the same messages as the more abundant marine reptile remains.”

“They tell us that, just before the Cretaceous-Paleogene crisis, biodiversity was not declining but on the contrary, was diverse,” Jalil added.