In 2019, a team of researchers uncovered a 70-million-year-old dinosaur in a Patagonian province of Argentina. The dinosaur, a hunter, was a 23-foot-tall predator whose long, powerful arms were tipped with massive claws. And it came with an unexpected bonus.
As the team led by Lucio Ibiricu, a paleontologist at the Patagonian Institute of Geology and Paleontology, worked on the remains, they realized that a bone tucked between the jaws was not from the skeleton: it was, instead, the upper arm bone of a crocodile relative. The dinosaur’s teeth were actually touching the crocodile bone.
It was such a bizarre discovery that team members joked that the dinosaur had “choked on a croc leg,” said Matt Lamanna, a paleontologist at the Carnegie Museum. “We don’t believe that, but we also don’t think it’s impossible.”
He added, “Either it was feeding on this animal, or it’s nature playing one hell of a cruel joke on us.”
The group to which the dinosaur belonged, the megaraptors, is typically known only from scrappy remains that don’t include the bones of their dinner. But in a paper published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, a team including Dr. Ibiricu and Dr. Lamanna announced that their discovery is the most complete member of the megaraptor family. They named it the Joaquinraptor, after Dr. Ibiricu’s son, and argue that it shows that the megaraptors were some of Earth’s most powerful predators right up to the time of dinosaur extinction.
The first megaraptor was discovered in 1996 by Fernando E. Novas, an Argentine paleontologist. He spotted scattered bones — including a giant claw — and named the animal assuming it belonged to the same group as the velociraptors. As more bones came to light in South America, Asia and Australia, researchers wrangled over which dinosaurs the group was closest to in the broader family of predatory dinosaurs.
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