Scientists unearth dinosaur that was Europe’s top Jurassic predator

A newly-named dinosaur species, unearthed from western Portugal, has taken its place as the largest predator to roam what is now Europe, joining the ranks of 'super-predators' like North America's Tyrannosaurus and Africa's Carcharodontosaurus.

This dinosaur, which goes by the name Torvosaurus gurneyi, was first discovered in 2003, by an amateur paleontologist who found part of the creature's jaw bone in the cliffs around Lourinhã, in western Portugal. Several other pieces, including teeth, a shin bone and pieces of the vertebrae from its tail, were uncovered over time, and initially, scientists thought that it was a member of a species that had already been discovered — Torvosaurus tanneri — which lived in what is now North America, roughly 150 million years ago.

However, when two paleontologists at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Christophe Hendrickx and Octávio Mateus, examined the fossils more closely, they found that it certainly belonged to the genus Torvosaurus, but it was actually a different, previously-undiscovered species. The two published their research paper on T. gurneyi in the online journal PLOS ONE on March 5, 2014. The new name they gave to the species was inspired by author and illustrator James Gurney, who created the Dinotopia book series.

From the fossils found, the researchers estimate that T. gurneyi was about 10 metres long, weighed in at around four to five tons, and had 10 centimetre-long, blade-like teeth. That's smaller than Tyrannosaurus and Carcharodontosaurus, which grew up to around 12 metres long. However, both of those dinosaurs came about in the Cretaceous period, 50 to 100 million years after T. gurneyi, so the species had longer to evolve their larger forms. Still, T. gurneyi was more than a match for any other dinosaurs living in its part of the world during the late Jurassic.

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That's one thing that this discovery is changing. Prior to this, it was thought that the environment of Europe at the time — a collection of large islands, rather than a continuous land-mass — had limited the size of dinosaurs living there. So, with limited territory and resources, nothing would have grown quite as big as the predator dinos that called larger land-masses like North America and Africa home. However, T. gurneyi shows that Europe still had right stuff to join the prehistoric 'super-predator club.'

(Image courtesy: Hendrickx/Mateus/PLOS ONE)

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