While studying rocks with his geologist parents in Chile, seven-year-old Diego Suarez unearthed the remains of a dinosaur that scientists are calling a relative of the Tyrannosaurus Rex. While the Chilesaurus diegosuarezi shares the small hands and two fingers of its iconic carnivorous cousin, scientists have determined that the newly discovered dinosaur was actually a vegetarian.
Diego Suarez stumbled upon the dinosaur’s bones while looking for stones with his sister during a family trip to Patagonia, and scientists decided to name the creature after the young boy and the region he found it in. Researchers proceeded to dig up over a dozen of the same dinosaur where Suarez first made his discovery, and determined that while some were only the size of a turkey, the dinosaur may have grown to the size of a small horse. The bones also revealed that the Chilesaurus had arms reminiscent of a T. Rex, but had feet similar to that of a long-neck dinosaur and had the pelvis of a more herbivorous species.
“Different parts of its body resemble those of other dinosaur groups due to mosaic convergent evolution,” said Martin Ezcurra, a professor at the University of Birmingham, in a recent press release. “In this process, a region or regions of an organism resemble others of unrelated species because of a similar mode of life and evolutionary pressures.”
Ezcurra called the Chilesaurus one of the “most interesting cases of convergent evolution documented in the history of life,” and hopes it will shed new light on the evolutionary patterns of a number of different dinosaurs.
