Science & Environment

Dinosaur named 'thunder-thighs'

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Media captionDr Mike Taylor explains why he thinks Brontomerus had "thunder thighs". All footage courtesy of UCL.











Chief among them is a hip-bone, called the ilium, which is unusually large in comparison to that of similar dinosaurs.

Image caption The size and shape of the hip-bone tells scientists about the muscles in the leg


"As you put the skeleton together, you can run muscles down from the hip-bone to join at the knee and that gives you a whopping thigh," Dr Taylor told BBC News.



The adult would have weighed about six tonnes - something like the size of a large modern elephant - and probably measured 14m in length.

The juvenile would have weighed in at about 200kg - the size of a pony - and been 4.5m long.

Brontomerus was living in what geologists term the Early Cretaceous Period.

Some other marks on the fossils give additional clues to what sort of lifestyle the creature had and the environment it faced.

"The shoulder blade of Brontomerus has unusual bumps that probably mark the boundaries of muscle attachments, suggesting that Brontomerus had powerful forelimb muscles as well," explained team-member Dr Matt Wedel, from the Western University of Health Sciences in Pomona, California.

Image caption Scientists may be missing many bones, plundered from the quarry site by commercial fossil-hunters


The team also believes the find is significant for its position in Earth history, in that it challenges the notion that sauropods began to disappear in the Early Cretaceous.

"Because sauropods were the most abundant dinosaurs found during the Jurassic Period and the rarest during the Early Cretaceous, there's long been the perception that sauropods were successful in the Jurassic and were replaced by duckbills and horned dinosaurs in the Cretaceous," said Dr Wedel.


Dr Taylor is disappointed that more of Brontomerus could not be recovered, and wonders whether larger fossil pieces are being held in some unknown private collection.

"The fossil-hunters basically pillaged this site," he told BBC News.


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