The large carnivorous dinosaurs of the Mesozoic are inevitably among the most exciting of these extinct animals, but they are also among the hardest to study as they were rare. Anyone who has been on safari will recognise the issue – you can see hundreds of wildebeest or zebra for you set eyes on a lion, and similarly there may have been only one Tyrannosaurus knocking around for every few dozen Triceratops or other big herbivores. As a result, fossil of these are few and far between and reconstructing evolutionary or ecological patterns.
Enter the new dinosaur Siats meekerorum, named today in a paper in Nature Communications. The genus name Siats is from a legendary monster from the Ute tribe of Utah (where the dinosaur was found), with the species name meekerorum a tribute to the Meeker family who support palaeontological research. The fossil is rather incomplete and there’s little more than a partial pelvis and some vertebrae and part of the lower leg, but this is enough to confidently assign this to a new animal, and to work out to which evolutionary group it belongs. Siats is part of a group called the allosauroids, one of the major lineages of large carnivorous dinosaurs with some members becoming true giants that rivaled anything the tyrannosaurs (Tyrannosaurus and its relatives) could produce.
The genus name sounds a lot like the Russian word for rabbit. :)
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