The icon of the loom T. king and its comically undersize weapon is deeply grain in papa culture , but it is n’t really mediocre . They were powerful fiddling appendages well - suited to their evolutionary purpose . The wimpy - armed Carnotaurus is another story wholly .
As you could see in the skeleton up top , Carnotaurus had weapon that even T. Rex would snigger at . It was n’t a altogether amusing dinosaur , in fairness – its name does mean “ centre - eating bull ” , which is passably coolheaded , and it did have a distich of horns sticking out of its skull to really nail the bullish aspect . While Tyrannosaurus reign Asia and North America in the Late Cretaceous , Carnotaurus occupied a like use in South America .
But there really is n’t any bewilder away from just how ludicrously bantam its weaponry were . Indeed , some paleontologists had ruminate that these were wholly rudimentary limb , a useless monitor of when the dinosaur had working arms . Now palaeontologist Javier Ruiz and his colleagues can add up a footling more to the puzzle of just why Carnotaurus made do with such wimpish arms .
They point out that Carnotaurus probably did n’t have totally useless arms – the r and ulna os that make up the depleted arm appear astonishingly strong and robust , even if they ’re just a after part the length of the upper arm . But the mitt does look unusually unaccented , specially compare to the rest of the arm . And yet the hand still had four fingers , suggesting hands still served some evolutionary purpose or had only relatively recently become vestigial .
This all fits with a broader evolutionary trend of dinosaur like Carnotaurus , in which arm off-white that were strong and hefty in the Jurassic had become delimitation vestigial in the Cretaceous . Just why this is remains a mystery , and the midget size of it and decrepit hand of Carnotaurus represent a particular extreme . For now , all we can really say is that Carnotaurus probably takes the booty for the most entirely useless arms of any jumbo dinosaur … but , uh , do n’t ask me to say that to its face . Its face has horn .
PaleontologyviaDinosaur Tracking . Image byPacka .
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