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A Huge Meat Eater

Who's the biggest, baddest dinosaur carnivore? It's not Tyrannosaurus rex. When it comes to size, the king appears to be Mapusaurus roseae. Last week, paleontologists reported that the new species may have been larger than T. rex and about the same size as Giganotosaurus carolinii, another great meat eater.

Scientists discovered Mapusaurus in southern Argentina, where Gigan-otosaurus was found. From 1997 to 2001, paleontologists unearthed hundreds of bones belonging to seven to nine creatures. The dinosaurs seem to range in size from 18 feet to 41 feet long. No complete skeleton was found.

Rodolfo Coria of the Carmen Funes Museum, in Argentina, and Philip Currie of the University of Alberta, in Canada, oversaw the dig. They believe that the presence of several Mapusauruses may mean that the dinosaurs lived and hunted in groups. The razor-toothed meat eaters may have preyed on the even bigger, 125-foot-long plant-eating dinosaur Argentinosaurus. "The evidence suggests that Mapusaurus traveled in packs, so they may have behaved like wolves trying to take down a moose," Currie told TFK.

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