New dinosaur species found in Utah was a Tyrannosaurus rival

[truebluefan]

This 30-foot-long allosauroid dinosaur, shown in an artist's rendering, kept the family of Tyrannosaurus rex from assuming the predator crown for millions of years, a study suggests.


Meet the rex wrecker, a 3-ton competitor to tyrannosaurs who stoked a family rivalry over millions of years in western North America.

The fossil find in central Utah, dubbed Siats meekerorum, was from the Allosauroid family, weighed around 3 tons, was as long as a boxcar and roamed what now is the intermountain West of the United States around 98 million years ago, according to a study of the find published online Friday in the journal Nature Communications.

S. meekerorum probably competed alongside members of the tyrannosauroid mega-family before it faded away, opening up the evolutionary niche that allowed for new, massive species including Tyrannosaurus rex, the authors suggest.

http://www.latimes.com/science/scie...s-rival-20131122,0,130987.story#ixzz2lhp5pgMj