Santiago, Chile.- Scientists They found remains of four types of dinosaursamong them a megaraptorin an inhospitable area of the Patagonia Chile that, for a decade, has become an important deposit of fossils, the researchers reported this Wednesday.
After collecting fossils in the guido hillLocated in the valley of the chinasnear the border with Argentina -about 2,800 kilometers south of Santiago-, in 2021 scientists took these remains to the laboratory and managed to verify that they belonged to dinosaurs that they had not previously identified in this place.
“It’s always super exciting in scientific terms find something that has not been found before nor that it had been described in the Las Chinas valley, where we have begun to get used to having new findings of fossil remains,” Marcelo Leppe, director of the Chilean Antarctic Institute (Inach), part of the team that carried out the study, told AFP. finding.
According to the research, the findings represent the southernmost fossil record of this type of dinosaur outside of Antarctica.
In December 2021, were presented by Chilean paleontologists the remains of a Stegouros elengassen, an enigmatic dinosaur whose club-shaped tail puzzled scientists, found in this same area of Chilean Patagonia.
The new discovery was made by the Inach in collaboration with researchers from the University of Chile and the University of Texas in the United States, who were able to identify remains of four types of dinosaurs, including teeth and postcranial bone parts of a megaraptor belonging to the theropod family.
These carnivorous dinosaurs had raptor claws, small ripping teeth, and large upper limbs, which, according to the research, put them at the top of the food chain in this area. lived between 66 and 75 million years back to the end of the Cretaceous period.
“One of the characteristics that allowed to identify with great confidence that they belong to megaraptorids arefirst of all, that the teeth are very curved towards the back,” says Jared Amudeo, a researcher at the Paleontological Network of the University of Chile, in a statement released by this house of studies.
They also identified two specimens of Unenlagiinaeclosely related to the velociraptors, which have a “novel evolutionary character, which would indicate that it is a new species of an enlagin or perhaps a representative of a different clade (group), “said Amudeo.
They also found remains of two lineages of birds: an Enantiornithe, the most diverse group of birds and abundant from the Mesozoic; and Ornithurinae, a group directly related to modern birds.
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The scientists’ work was collected in a study which last December was published in the prestigious journal Journal of South American Earth Sciences.
AFP
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