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Carnotaurus sastrei  (Bonaparte,1985)
Name Means: "Flesh-eating Bull" Length: 24 Feet (7.5m)
Pronounced: car-no-tore -us Weight: 1 ton (960 kilos)
When it lived: Middle Cretaceous - 115 MYA    
Where found: Patagonia, Argentina    
     Carnotaurus is one of the strangest dinosaurs to have come from South America. It was discovered in Patagonia, the southern tip of Argentina. 
     The most unusual feature of this meat-eating dinosaur was that it had two short, knobby eyebrow-horns and a small, deep shaped skull, making it look somewhat like a bull.  These characteristics are reflected in its name.  The horns were probably used more to impress females than for fighting.
     Carnotaurus was fierce looking fellow. Its eyes faced forward, which is unusual in a dinosaur, and may indicate binocular vision and depth perception.  It could look you in the eye, then flash a mouthful of flesh-tearing teeth, which enough to scare the pajamas off anything. 
     .  Although the upper part of the skull seems powerful, the lower part appears slender and weak. The snout is incredibly blunt and deep, giving Carnotaurus the appearance of a dinosaur bulldog. Perhaps the strangest feature of this theropod is its tiny, underdeveloped arms, probably the tiniest of any of the larger meat-eaters.  Its arms were so short that the hands appeared to sprout almost directly from the elbows. The forearms were not much longer than the fingers and they did not bend.  It had primitive four-fingered hands and one of the fingers was a backward-facing spike.  The palms faced outwards.
    Carnotaurus sastrei was discovered in province of the Chubut by doctor A'ngel Tailor, who noticed a concretion of bone fragments. It was excavated in 1984 by José F. Bonaparte, who led a paleontological expedition of the Argentine Museum of Natural Sciences. it seemed that it was impossible to extract that material because it was on a tremendously hard rock, but eventually a single nearly complete skeleton has been described including impressions of skin along almost the entire right side. 
    Carnotaurus provided the best theropod skin impressions ever found. The skin was leather-like and lined with rows of bumps, that become larger toward the spine.  These small cone-shaped nodules, each about two inches (5 cm) across, were regularly spaced over its body.  Bonaparte says that when dying, this animal had been thrown on the mud, that when becoming hardened perfectly copied the texture of the leather.  Although closely related to the feathered dinosaurs, the highly-detailed skin impressions showed no sign of feathers.

 

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