Giganotosaurus

Giganotosaurus was a very large meat-eating dinosaur that lived in prehistoric South America.

Scientists haven’t yet discovered a complete Giganotosaurus specimen. Some of the skeleton is still unknown.

Without having the full skeleton, it’s hard to say for sure just how big Giganotosaurus was and how it compared to other dinosaurs.

At around 13 metres long, it was probably longer but more lightly built than the bulkier and heavier Tyrannosaurus rex.

Carcharodontosaurus was also potentially very large and may have been as long as Giganotosaurus.

The longest known meat-eating dinosaur was Spinosaurus, at 14 metres long.

Giganotosaurus was first discovered in 1993 in the Patagonia region of Argentina.

The species was officially named Giganotosaurus carolinii in 1995. The name refers not only to fossil hunter Rubén Carolini who discovered the first specimen but to the location where he found it, as Giganotosaurus means giant southern lizard.

Giganotosaurus went extinct around 98 million years ago, during the Late Cretaceous Period.

This was long before the mass extinction event at the end of the Cretaceous around 66 million years ago that wiped out the dinosaurs.

Given its huge size, Giganotosaurus was almost certainly the apex predator of its environment – meaning it was at the top of the food chain. But experts aren’t sure what it hunted.

Some scientists think they might have preyed on very large sauropod dinosaurs, working together in packs to take down these plant-eating giants.

But other researchers think that’s unlikely, as there aren’t many meat-eating animals alive today that try to take on prey bigger than themselves. They say Giganotosaurus might have looked for smaller dinosaurs or scavenged large creatures that were already dead.

Either way, Giganotosaurus had very strong jaws and could certainly deliver a powerful bite.