Don’t let this fella’s comically beady eyes fool you, they’re the eyes of a killer.
Meet Tameryraptor markgrafi, or ‘thief from the beloved land,’ a dinosaur that once roamed Egypt 95 million years ago during the Cretaceous period.
Towering at 33-feet, as tall as a telephone pole, this dinosaur is one of the largest land carnivores in history.
German scientists discovered the fossilised remains of this bloodthirsty giant in the Bahariya Oasis in Egypt’s Western Desert in 1914.
Palaeontologist Ernst Stromer von Reichenbach packed up the bones and moved them to the Bavarian State Collection for Palaeontology and Geology in Munich.
But the specimen, originally classified as Carcharodontosaurus, meaning ‘shark-toothed lizard’, was destroyed during World War II when the museum was bombed on July 21 1944.
The dino was soon ‘forgotten’, with the only evidence of it being a few sketches of the bones and the odd photograph, the Bavarian Natural History Collections said.
Now scientists have recreated Tameryraptor markgrafi for the first time using newly discovered images of the remains.
Palaeontologist Maximilian Kellermann, a master’s student at LMU Munich, said his team were ‘surprised’ when they saw the images.
The findings, published in PLOS ONE on Tuesday, described the predator as having symmetrical teeth, a nasal horn and an enlarged frontal brain.
These features are fairly different from the genus Carcharodontosaurus that lived in Northwest Africa from about 100,000,000 years ago.
‘The Egyptian dinosaur fossil depicted there differs significantly from more recent Carcharodontosaurus finds in Morocco,’ Kellermann said.
‘Stromer’s original classification was thus incorrect. We identified a completely different, previously unknown predatory dinosaur species here and named it Tameryraptor markgrafi.’
Alongside being closely related to Carcharodontosaurs, palaeontologists found it’s related to a group of predatory dinosaurs from Asia known for being light on their feet, the Metriacanthosaurs.
This suggests that dinosaur life was more diverse than ‘previously thought’, researchers said, so much so they had to make an entirely new species.
Tameryraptor markgrafi was an ‘exceptional case’.
‘Tameryraptor’ splices together ‘Ta Mery’, what ancient Egyptians once called their country, and, of course, raptors. The second word honours Stromer’s fossil collector Richard Markgra.
‘This work shows that it can be worthwhile for palaeontologists to dig not only in the ground but also in old archives,’ added Oliver Rauhut, of the Bavarian State Collection for Palaeontology and Geology.
‘However, a more comprehensive assessment of the Cretaceous predatory dinosaur fauna from the Bahariya Oasis would require the recovery of more fossils from the site.’
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