A new dinosaur named Brontomerus mcintoshi, or “thunder-thighs” after its enormously powerful thigh muscles, has been discovered in Utah, USA.
The new species is described in a paper recently published in the journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica by an international team of scientists from the U.K. and the U.S. Primary author Mike Taylor is a researcher in the Department of Earth Sciences at University College London. Co-authors are Mathew Wedel, assistant professor of anatomy at Western University of Health Sciences, Pomona, Calif.; and Richard L. Cifelli, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, University of Oklahoma.
A member of the long-necked sauropod group of dinosaurs which includes Diplodocus and Brachiosaurus, Brontomerus may have used its powerful thighs as a weapon to kick predators, or to help travel over rough, hilly terrain. Brontomerus lived about 110 million years ago, during the Early Cretaceous Period, and probably had to contend with fierce “raptors” such as Deinonychus and Utahraptor.
The fossilized bones of two specimens – an adult and a juvenile – of Brontomerus mcintoshi were rescued by researchers from the Sam Noble Museum from a quarry in eastern Utah that had been looted and damaged, possibly by commercial fossil hunters. Paleontologists speculate that the larger specimen is the mother of the younger and would have weighed around 6 tons (about the size of a large elephant) and measured 14 meters in length.
Image: Sam Noble Museum of Natural History
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