About 90 million years ago, a gigantic apex predator — a meat-eating dinosaur with serrated shark-like teeth — prowled what is now Uzbekistan, according to a new study of the behemoth's jawbone.
The 26-foot-long (8 meters) beast weighed 2,200 pounds (1,000 kilograms), making it longer than an African elephant and heavier than a bison. Researchers named it Ulughbegsaurus uzbekistanensis, after Ulugh Beg, a 15th-century astronomer, mathematician and sultan from what is now Uzbekistan.
What caught scientists by surprise was that the dinosaur was much larger — twice the length and more than five times heavier — than its ecosystem's previously known apex predator: a tyrannosaur, the researchers found.
The chunk of jawbone was found in Uzbekistan's Kyzylkum Desert in the 1980s, and researchers rediscovered it in 2019 in an Uzbekistan museum collection.
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