Back in the 1980s, a dinosaur jawbone was found in the Kyzylkum desert, the 15th largest desert in the world and a region shared among the countries of Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan. Fast forward nearly three decades, and the fossil would find itself in the hands of researchers once again, as the partial jawbone was rediscovered in a museum collection in Uzbekistan in 2019.
Now, new studies into the bone have revealed its identity: a 90-million-year old jawbone of an ancient carcharodontosaur who was granted the scientific name Ulughbegsaurus uzbekistanensis. Carcharodontosaurs are a family of carnivorous dinosaurs whose group name was derived from the shark genus Carcharodon, and was inspired by the fact that the teeth of the eponymous dinosaur and type species Carcharodontosaurus saharicus resembled that of the great white shark’s. (C. saharicus and its partner species C. iguidensis are known to be among some of the largest carnivores to have ever walked the Earth, rivaling the sizes of giants like Tyrannosaurus rex and Spinosaurus aegyptiacus.)
The name U. uzbekistanensis was named after Ulugh Beg, a 15th century sultan, astronomer, and mathematician, from Uzbekistan. The newly-classified meat-eater was described in a new study led by Kohei Tanaka, an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Life and Environmental Sciences at the University of Tsukuba, Japan. This study was published in the journal Royal Society Open Science.
U. uzbekistanensis was estimated to be around 8 meters (26 feet) long, and may have weighed at around 1,000 kilograms (2,200 pounds). What makes this finding striking, despite its estimation, is the fact that this carcharodontosaur may have been twice as long and more than five times as heavy as the tyrannosaur Timurlengia euotica—a previously-discovered carnivorous dinosaur in the area, and was also previously believed to be the apex predator of the ancient ecosystem of Uzbekistan some 90 million years ago. U. uzbekistanensis is now also the first-ever carcharodontosaur discovered in Central Asia, according to Tanaka and team.
Co-author and associate professor of paleobiology at the University of Calgary Darla Zelenitsky mentioned that carcharodontosaurs like U. uzbekistanensis were usually more slender and lighter in frame compared to tyrannosaurs like T. euotica. Peter Makovicky, a professor of paleontology from the University of Minnesota and who was not involved with this study, believes that the single piece of bone found for the new dinosaur was “so big” that U. uzbekistanensis “would have been a very large predatory dinosaur and very likely the apex predator in its ecosystem,” according to Makovicky’s exchange with science news website Live Science.
Tanaka and the rest of the research team also believe the find to be the last case found of a carcharodontosaur and a tyrannosaur sharing the same habitat. According to University of Edinburgh paleontologist Stephen Brusatte, who was also uninvolved with the research, this carcharodontosaur may possibly be the last-known dinosaur of its kind to have ever lived. “This is one new bone, and really just part of a bone, but its importance far eclipses its looks.”
Carcharodontosaurs like U. uzbekistanensis disappeared from the fossil record at around 90 million years ago; this coincides with Brusatte’s statement that U. uzbekistanensis may as well be one of the last dinosaurs of its kind during its final days.
References
- Black, R. (2021, September 8). New, Giant Carnivorous Dinosaur Was a Terror to Smaller Tyrannosaurs. Smithsonian Magazine. Retrieved September 22, 2021, from https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/new-giant-carnivorous-dinosaur-was-terror-smaller-tyrannosaurs-180978599/
- Geggel, L. (2021, September 9). Gigantic ‘shark-toothed’ dinosaur discovered in Uzbekistan. Live Science. Retrieved September 22, 2021, from https://www.livescience.com/shark-toothed-dinosaur-uzbekistan.html
- Tanaka, K., Anvarov, O. U. O., Zelenitsky, D. K., Ahmedshaev, A. S., & Kobayashi, Y. (n.d.). A new carcharodontosaurian theropod dinosaur occupies apex predator niche in the early Late Cretaceous of Uzbekistan. Royal Society Open Science, 8(9), 210923. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.210923
