2023-08-23 17:08:35
MADRID, 23 Ago. (EUROPA PRESS) –
Paleontologists have discovered in Morocco fossils of primitive cousins of the T. rex that they had short bulldog muzzles and even shorter arms.
The two new dinosaur species belong to the Abelisaurids, a family of carnivorous dinosaurs that were homologues of Northern Hemisphere tyrannosaurs. They lived at the end of the Cretaceous period and show that dinosaurs were diverse in Africa just before its mass extinction by an asteroid 66 million years ago.
Two new species of dinosaurs from the late Cretaceous have been found in Morocco, just outside Casablanca. One species, found near the town of Sidi Daoui, is represented by a predator’s foot bone about eight feet long. The other, from nearby Sidi Chennane, is the shinbone of a carnivore that grew to about five meters in length.
Both were part of a family of early meat-eating dinosaurs known as abelisaurs, and lived alongside the much larger abelisaur Chenanisaurus barbaricus, showing that Morocco was home to diverse dinosaur species just before a giant asteroid hit at the end of the Cretaceous. , ending the age of dinosaurs.
Dr Nick Longrich, from the Milner Center for Evolution at the University of Bath, led the study, which was published in Cretaceous Research. He said: “The amazing thing here is that it’s all about seabeds. It’s a shallow tropical sea full of plesiosaurs, mosasaurs and sharks. It’s not exactly a place where one would expect to find many dinosaurs. But we are finding them.”
Although dinosaurs account for a small proportion of the fossils, the region is so rich in fossils that it has produced the best image of African dinosaurs since the end of the age of the dinosaurs.
Rather than finding the same few species, paleontologists often recover fossils of new species, suggesting that the beds support an extremely diverse dinosaur fauna.
So far, the small number of dinosaur fossils that have been recovered represent five different species: a small duck-billed dinosaur named Ajnabia, a long-necked titanosaur, the giant abelisaur Chenanisaurus, and now the two new abelisaurs.
Dr. Longrich said it’s a statement: “We have other fossils as well, but they are currently under study. So we can’t say much about them at this point, except that they were an amazingly diverse dinosaur fauna.”
The last dinosaurs disappeared around 66 million years ago, along with up to 90% of all species on Earth, including mosasaurs, plesiosaurs, pterosaurs, and ammonites. The pattern of extinction at the end of the Cretaceous and its causes have been debated for more than 200 years.
The impact of a giant asteroid on the Yucatan Peninsula has been linked to their demise, although it has been argued that the dinosaurs were already in decline. Moroccan dinosaurs suggest that they thrived in North Africa to the end.
“The end of the Cretaceous in western North America definitely seems to become less diverse at the end,” Longrich said. “But that’s only a small part of the world. It’s not clear that you can generalize from the dinosaurs of Wyoming and Montana to the entire world.
“It also got colder towards the end, so it wouldn’t be surprising if dinosaurs at higher latitudes became less diverse. But we don’t know much about lower-latitude dinosaurs. At least in Morocco, they seem to have remained diverse.” and successful to the end.
“When T. rex reigned as a mega-predator in North America, abelisaurs They were at the top of food chains in North Africa.said Nour-Eddine Jalil, a professor at the Natural History Museum and a researcher at Cadi Ayyad University in Morocco, who co-authored the paper.
“Dinosaur remains, despite their rarity, convey the same messages as the more abundant remains of marine reptiles. They tell us that, just before the Cretaceous-Paleogene crisis, biodiversity was not declining but, by the On the contrary, it was diverse”.
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