After collecting fossils on Cerro Guido, located in the Las Chinas Valley, near the border with Argentina about 2,800 km south of Santiago, in 2021, scientists transported these remains to the laboratory and managed to verify that they belonged to dinosaurs that they had not previously identified at this location.

The Chilean Antarctic Institute (Inach), together with researchers from the University of Chile and the University of Texas in the United States, have managed to identify the remains of four types of dinosaurs, including teeth and post-cranial bone parts of a megaraptor belonging to the theropod family.

"It's always very interesting in scientific terms to discover something that hadn't been found before in the Las Chinas Valley, where we started to get used to having new discoveries of fossil remains," he explained. AFP Marcelo Leppe, director of Inach).

These carnivorous dinosaurs had raptor claws, small ripping teeth and large upper limbs, which research suggests puts them at the top of the food chain in this area they inhabited between 66 and 75 million years ago. years at the end of the Cretaceous.

"One of the characteristics that allowed us to identify with great certainty their belonging to the megaraptoridae is, first of all, that the teeth are very curved backwards", explains Jared Amudeo, researcher of the Paleontological Network of the University of Chile, in a press release.

Also identified were two specimens of Unenlagia, closely related to Velociraptors, which have an "evolutionary character, which would indicate that they are a new species of Unenlagia or possibly a representative of a clade (group) different,” he clarified.

The researchers also found remains of two bird lineages: an Enantiornithe, the most diverse and abundant group of Mesozoic birds, and an Ornithurinae, a group directly related to modern birds.

In December 2021, Chilean paleontologists presented the remains of a Stegouros Elengassen, an enigmatic dinosaur whose club-shaped tail puzzled scientists, found in this same area of ​​Chilean Patagonia.

© 2023 AFP