“The fossil of M. gigas shows entire regions of the skeleton never seen before, such as the arms and legs that helped us understand some evolutionary trends and the anatomy of the Carcharodontosaurids, the group to which M. gigas belongs,” he says. Juan Canale. , the project led at the Ernesto Bachmann Paleontological Museum in Neuquén, Argentina.
The authors first set the record; T. rex did not get his short arms from M. gigas or vice versa. M. gigas not only became extinct almost 20 million years before T. rex became a species, but they are also far removed from the evolutionary tree. “There’s no direct relationship between the two,” Canale says. Rather, Canale believes that having small arms somehow gave the two dinosaurs some sort of survival advantage.