Fossilized bones discovered on a rocky seashore on England’s Isle of Wight are the remains of a meat-eating dinosaur that may be larger than any other known from Europe, a beast that was a cousin of the biggest carnivorous dinosaur species on record.
Paleontologists said on Thursday they have found parts of the skeleton of the dinosaur, which lived about 125 million years ago during the Cretaceous Period, including bones of the back, hips and tail, some limb fragments but no skull or teeth. Based on the partial remains, they estimated that the dinosaur exceeded 33 feet (10 meters) long and perhaps reached much more.
“The size of the specimen is impressive. It is one of the biggest – and possibly the biggest – known land predator ever to stalk Europe,” said Chris Barker, a University of Southampton doctoral student in paleontology and lead author of the study published in the journal PeerJ Life & Environment.
Based in part on a series of small grooves on the top of the tail vertebra, they concluded that it belonged to a group of dinosaurs called spinosaurs that included Spinosaurus, which lived about 95 million years ago and at about 50 feet (15 meters) long is considered the longest-known dinosaur predator.
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