By Marion Giraldo
– Scientists in Chile’s Patagonia area are unearthing the southernmost dinosaur fossils recorded exterior Antarctica, together with stays of megaraptors that may have dominated the realm’s meals chain earlier than their mass extinction.
Fossils of megaraptors, a carnivorous dinosaur that inhabited components of South America in the course of the Cretaceous interval some 70 million years in the past, had been present in sizes as much as 10 meters lengthy, in keeping with the Journal of South American Earth Sciences.
“We had been lacking a bit,” Marcelo Leppe, director of the Chilean Antarctic Institute (INACH), instructed Reuters. “We knew the place there have been massive mammals, there would even be massive carnivores, however we hadn’t discovered them but.”
The stays, recovered from Chile’s far south Rio de las Chinas Valley within the Magallanes Basin between 2016 and 2020, additionally embody some uncommon stays of unenlagia, velociraptor-like dinosaurs which probably lived lined in feathers.
The specimens, in keeping with College of Chile researcher Jared Amudeo, had some traits not current in Argentine or Brazilian counterparts.
“It may very well be a brand new species, which may be very probably, or belong to a different household of dinosaurs which are carefully associated,” he stated, including extra conclusive proof is required.
The research additionally shed extra gentle on the circumstances of the meteorite affect on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula that will have triggered the dinosaurs’ extinction some 65 million years in the past.
INACH‘s Leppe pointed to a pointy drop in temperatures over present-day Patagonia and waves of intense chilly lasting as much as a number of thousand years, in distinction to the extraordinarily heat local weather that prevailed for a lot of the Cretaceous interval.
“The big variation we're seeing, the organic range, was additionally responding to very highly effective environmental stimuli,” Leppe stated.
“This world was already in disaster earlier than (the meteorite) and that is evidenced within the rocks of the Rio de las Chinas Valley,” he stated.
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