Newly Discovered Tyrant Dinosaur Stalked Ancient New Mexico

Dynamoterror was about 30 feet long, hunting prey during the Late Cretaceous. (Western Science Center)

The Smithsonian has a post about a new tyrannosaur.  Its name is Dynamoterror and it lived about 80 million years ago in what is now New Mexico.  The paper, published in PeerJ, describes the 30 foot long meat eater, which probably snacked on hadrosaurs, armored dinosaurs, and ceratopsians that lived in the hot, humid, and lush forests and swamps that covered the southwestern U.S. at that time.

The remains of Dynamoterror were found in New Mexico’s Menefee Formation in 2012 during an expedition led by Western Science Center paleontologist Andrew McDonald and CEO of the Zuni Dinosaur Institute for Geosciences, Douglas Wolfe. During that year’s field season, expedition volunteer Eric Gutierrez found fragmented bones spilling out of the sandstone.* Dinosaurs are hard to find in this part of the San Juan Basin, making almost any find worth noting, but initial clues indicated that this find was something special.

“We could tell that it was a large theropod from the large fragments of hollow limb bones,” McDonald says, referring to the broader family that tyrannosaurs, ostrich mimic dinosaurs, raptors, birds and others belong to.