Student discovers new carnivore dinosaur 3x older than T. rex
“You want to stick your finger in a dinosaur brain?” That was Simba Srivastava’s first reaction to the battered fossil sitting in a paleobiology lab at Virginia Tech, a skull so crushed and twisted that he described it in less-than-flattering terms. “This is a uniquely sucky specimen,” he said. “It’s so bad. Like, if you saw a human skull in this way, you’d throw up.” And yet that same fossil, pulled from a drawer decades after it was unearthed in New Mexico, has turned into something unusually important. After two years of work, Srivastava and his colleagues identified it as a new species of carnivorous dinosaur, one that lived near the end of the Triassic and may mark one of the last appearances of a very old dinosaur lineage before it disappeared. The animal has been named Ptychotherates bucculentus, a name that means “folded hunter with full cheeks.” The description fits. Its skull was badly distorted before fossilization and then flattened further over time, leaving researchers to digitally sort out a jumble of bones. But …
