Spectrovenator ragei: new basal abelisaurid

[Ikessauro]

A new basal unique abelisaurid has been reported from Early Cretaceous rocks from Brazil. The skeleton was found underneath the skeleton of another dino, Tapuiasaurus.

This new animal is quite interesting and has been given a quite cool name: Spectrovenator or Ghost Hunter. Can't wait for someone to make a toy out of it. Hey CollectA, what do you say? 

Skeleton: Blue partes are the preserved bones. Yay for the Complete Skull!!


http://sciencepress.mnhn.fr/fr/periodiques/comptes-rendus-palevol/19/6


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrovenator

[Faelrin]

Glad to see this one has the skull, and most of the skeleton as well. I like the name too.

[Loon]

Now that's a good name for a dinosaur! I don't ever recall seeing a basal abelisaurid before; it's interesting how it still somewhat looks like a "normal theropod". I'd definitely dig a figure of this; really, any abelisaurid outside of Carnotaurus would be good.

[Smilodon P.]

Whoa! This is a fantastic discovery!


For an abelissaurid, I just didn't expect  a fossil from such a small animal:

[Jose S.M.]

It's so nice the skull was found! That reconstruction above looks kind of funny to me. It's like it was a medium to large sized theropod and got shrinked to a tiny size.

[Takama]

I heard some say it looks like 1998s Godzilla in the Head

[Loon]

I have a hard time believing this reconstruction is from this year.

[Ikessauro]

Here's another paleoart of the animal by my friend Johnny Mingau

[Shonisaurus]

I hope that one day some well-known toy dinosaur company such as Safari, Collecta or Papo will portray that species. It is a curious animal as interesting as the chilesaurus.