The most famous of all dinosaurs, Tyrannosaurus rex, managed to be fearsome enough to star posthumously in a Hollywood blockbuster despite its comically short arms. Some other, lesser-known dinosaurs also combined a large head with short forelimbs, and a study published today (July 7) in Current Biology identifies yet another, which lived 20 million years before T. rex and belonged to an entirely different group—suggesting there was likely an evolutionary advantage to the combo.
“For a long time, we thought it was mostly tyrannosaurs that did the big head, long legs, small arms thing,” James Napoli at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, who wasn’t involved in the research, tells New Scientist. The study reveals that Meraxes gigas, which belongs to a group called carcharodontosaurs, also sported those physical characteristics.
The results are based on fossils, including M. gigas’s skull and limbs, that the study authors unearthed ...
