Photo Copyright Jorge Gonzalez
Researchers from Chicago’s Field Museum, the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and North Carolina State University recently announced the discovery of a new dinosaur type. It’s called Siats meekerorum (pronounced “See-atch”); remains that stetched more than 30 feet long – found in eastern Utah.
They say it lived about 100 million years ago, weighed four tons and was most likely at the top of the prehistoric food chain; a species which resembles the Tyrannosaurus rex. It is believed to have ruled its ecosystem in the middle of the Cretaceous, a period known as final stages of the “Age of Dinosaurs.”
According to the study report: Named after a cannibalistic man-eating monster from Ute tribal legend, Siats is a species of carcharodontosaur, a group of giant meat-eaters that includes some of the largest predatory dinosaurs ever discovered. The only other carcharodontosaur known from North America is Acrocanthosaurus, which roamed eastern North America more than 10 million years earlier. Siats is only the second carcharodontosaur ever discovered in North America; Acrocanthosaurus, discovered in 1950, was the first.
