Scientists have unearthed the 72-million-year-old teeth and bones of two different types of dinosaurs in Saudi Arabia, a rare spot for this kind of discovery.

Two kinds of dinosaur fossils were identified at an excavation site, one a meat-eating abelisaurid, which is a distant relative of the toothy Tyrannosaurus Rex and the other a plant-eating titanosaur, a “Brontosaurus-like” sauropod.

“Dinosaur fossils are exceptionally rare in the Arabian Peninsula, with only a handful of highly fragmented bones documented this far,” said lead author of the study, Dr. Benjamin Kear in a news release issued by Uppsala University in Sweden.

“This discovery is important not only because of where the remains were found, but also because of the fact that we can actually identify them. Indeed, these are the first taxonomically recognizable dinosaurs reported from the Arabian Peninsula” Dr. Kear said.

An international team of researchers made the discovery in the north-western part of Saudi Arabia along the coast of the Red Sea. The team included scientists from Sweden, Australia and Saudi Arabia.

Fellow researcher Dr. Tom Rich of the Museum Victoria in Australia said, “The hardest fossil to find is the first one. Knowing that they occur in a particular area and the circumstances under which they do, makes finding more fossils significantly less difficult.”

Why are dinosaur remains so rare in Saudi Arabia?

Dr. Rich explains that when the dinosaurs were alive the Arabian landmass was largely underwater, forming the north-western coastal margin.  Now it is largely desert.

“Dinosaur remains from the Arabian Peninsula and the area east of the Mediterranean Sea are exceedingly rare because sedimentary rocks deposited in streams and rivers during the Age of Dinosaurs are rare, particularly in Saudi Arabia itself,” Dr. Rich said.

The findings were recently published in the scientific journal PLOS ONE.  In it, the authors say that the recognition of the dinosaur remains in that region “extends the palaeogeographical range of these groups along the entire northern Gondwanan margin during the latest Cretaceous. Moreover, given the extreme paucity of coeval occurrences elsewhere, the Saudi Arabian fossils provide a tantalizing glimpse into dinosaurian assemblage diversity within the region.”