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“You could already see the femur, part of the head, the cranium,” says Muller, who was finishing his degree at the time. “We practically don’t have this type of dinosaur here. It’s very rare, and it was so exciting.”
Dated to 230 million years ago, the newly named Gnathovorax cabreirai lived in a forested area during the Triassic period, when South America was still part of the supercontinent Pangaea.
DINOSAURS 101
Over a thousand dinosaur species once roamed the Earth. Learn which ones were the largest and the smallest, what dinosaurs ate and how they behaved, as well as surprising facts about their extinction.
The animal died in a flood plain, allowing sediment from a nearby river to cover its skeleton and create a stunningly intact fossil, which Muller and colleagues from the Federal University of Santa Maria and the University of São Paulo have now described in the journal Peer J.
The nearly perfect preservation of the dinosaur’s bones includes an undamaged brain case, an extremely rare find that allowed the team to reconstruct the dinosaur’s brain with CT scans. The structure reveals that this species was an active predator with good vision, focus, and balance, traits that helped it use its sharp, serrated teeth and long claws to capture its prey.
“Now, when we go to study the anatomy of other dinosaurs, this will most definitely act as a basis for that work,” Muller says.
A family affair?
Gnathovorax cabreirai measured almost 10 feet long, making it the biggest Brazilian dinosaur of its time. Buriolestes schultzi, another carnivorous dinosaur that would have lived alongside it, was only half its size.
