Based on a large leg bone that itself would have been over 3 feet long when complete, paleontologists believe that the dinosaur was large, but slightly smaller than famous meat eater Tyrannosaurus rex. The discovery is described in the new issue of the journal PLOS ONE.
“This fossil won’t win a beauty contest,” co-author Christian Sidor of the Burke Museum said in a press release. “But fortunately it preserves enough anatomy that we were able to compare it to other dinosaurs and be confident of its identification.”
Burke and colleague Brandon Peecook believe that the fossil belonged to a theropod. This refers to a group of dinosaurs that includes such iconic species Velociraptor, the aforementioned T. rex, and modern birds.
The fossil dates to the Late Cretaceous period and is about 80 million years old, so that’s when this Washington-dwelling dinosaur would have stomped around the Evergreen State. It probably lived in more of a marine environment, however, since clams from the same time period were also found fossilized with the dinosaur remains.
These particular clams, representative of the species Crassatellites conradiana, lived in shallow water. It’s therefore likely that the dinosaur died near the sea, was tossed by the waves, and eventually came to rest among the clams.
During the time of the as-of-yet unnamed dinosaur’s existence, rocks that today form Sucia Island were likely deposited farther south. Much of what is now Washington state was underwater then, so this dinosaur must have lived in a pocket of land surrounded by water.
“The fossil record of the West Coast is very spotty when compared to the rich record of the interior of North America,” Peecook said. “This specimen, though fragmentary, gives us insight into what the West Coast was like 80 million years ago, plus it gets Washington into the dinosaur club.”
Read more at Discovery News
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