{"id":35223,"date":"2025-09-23T15:00:09","date_gmt":"2025-09-23T15:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=35223"},"modified":"2025-09-26T10:24:44","modified_gmt":"2025-09-26T10:24:44","slug":"the-megaraptor-had-giant-claws-and-an-appetite-for-crocodilians","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=35223","title":{"rendered":"The Megaraptor Had Giant Claws and an Appetite for Crocodilians"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A fossil of the 23-foot-tall predator could help unlock secrets of an order of dinosaurs that remain poorly understood.<\/p>\n

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In 2019, a team of researchers uncovered a 70-million-year-old dinosaur in a Patagonian province of Argentina. The dinosaur, a hunter, was a 23-foot-tall predator whose long, powerful arms were tipped with massive claws. And it came with an unexpected bonus.<\/p>\n

As the team led by Lucio Ibiricu, a paleontologist at the Patagonian Institute of Geology and Paleontology, worked on the remains, they realized that a bone tucked between the jaws was not from the skeleton: it was, instead, the upper arm bone of a crocodile relative. The dinosaur\u2019s teeth were actually touching the crocodile bone.<\/p>\n

It was such a bizarre discovery that team members joked that the dinosaur had \u201cchoked on a croc leg,\u201d said Matt Lamanna, a paleontologist at the Carnegie Museum. \u201cWe don\u2019t believe that, but we also don\u2019t think it\u2019s impossible.\u201d<\/p>\n

He added, \u201cEither it was feeding on this animal, or it\u2019s nature playing one hell of a cruel joke on us.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The group to which the dinosaur belonged, the megaraptors, is typically known only from scrappy remains that don\u2019t include the bones of their dinner. But in a paper published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications,<\/a> a team including Dr. Ibiricu and Dr. Lamanna announced that their discovery is the most complete member of the megaraptor family. They named it the Joaquinraptor, after Dr. Ibiricu\u2019s son, and argue that it shows that the megaraptors were some of Earth\u2019s most powerful predators right up to the time of dinosaur extinction.<\/p>\n

The first megaraptor was discovered in 1996 by Fernando E. Novas, an Argentine paleontologist. He spotted scattered bones \u2014 including a giant claw \u2014 and named the animal assuming it belonged to the same group as the velociraptors. As more bones came to light in South America, Asia and Australia, researchers wrangled over which dinosaurs the group was closest to in the broader family of predatory dinosaurs.<\/p>\n

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A fossil of the 23-foot-tall predator could help unlock secrets of an order of dinosaurs that remain poorly understood.In 2019, a team of researchers uncovered a 70-million-year-old dinosaur in a Patagonian province of Argentina. The dinosaur, a hunter, was a 23-foot-tall predator whose long, powerful arms were tipped with massive claws. And it came with an unexpected bonus.As the team led by Lucio Ibiricu, a paleontologist at the Patagonian Institute of Geology and Paleontology, worked on the remains, they realized that a bone tucked between the jaws was not from the skeleton: it was, instead, the upper arm bone of a crocodile relative. The dinosaur\u2019s teeth were actually touching the crocodile bone.It was such a bizarre discovery that team members joked that the dinosaur had \u201cchoked on a croc leg,\u201d said Matt Lamanna, a paleontologist at the Carnegie Museum. \u201cWe don\u2019t believe that, but we also don\u2019t think it\u2019s impossible.\u201dHe added, \u201cEither it was feeding on this animal, or it\u2019s nature playing one hell of a cruel joke on us.\u201dThe group to which the dinosaur belonged, the megaraptors, is typically known only from scrappy remains that don\u2019t include the bones of their dinner. But in a paper published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, a team including Dr. Ibiricu and Dr. Lamanna announced that their discovery is the most complete member of the megaraptor family. They named it the Joaquinraptor, after Dr. Ibiricu\u2019s son, and argue that it shows that the megaraptors were some of Earth\u2019s most powerful predators right up to the time of dinosaur extinction.The first megaraptor was discovered in 1996 by Fernando E. Novas, an Argentine paleontologist. He spotted scattered bones \u2014 including a giant claw \u2014 and named the animal assuming it belonged to the same group as the velociraptors. As more bones came to light in South America, Asia and Australia, researchers wrangled over which dinosaurs the group was closest to in the broader family of predatory dinosaurs.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and\u00a0log into\u00a0your Times account, or\u00a0subscribe\u00a0for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?\u00a0Log in.Want all of The Times?\u00a0Subscribe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35225,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35223","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35223","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35223"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35223\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35226,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35223\/revisions\/35226"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/35225"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}