Tyrannosaurus Rex's big brother identified by fossil student

Published on Wednesday 12 December 2007 00:37

THE remains of one of the largest meat-eating dinosaurs ever found have been identified as a new species which more than rivals the Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Steve Brusatte, who is studying at Bristol University, made the discovery aged 20 while he was examining fossils at Chicago University in the US. The results have only now been published.

Only incomplete remains have ever been found but experts believe Carcharodontosaurus iguidensis would have been up to 14 metres long, with a skull around 1.75 metres long and teeth the size of bananas.

The fossils assessed by Mr Brusatte were found in 1997 by a Chicago University academic. Mr Brusatte said: "When I came to Chicago, they were just sort of lying around waiting for somebody to work on them." The first remains of Carcharodontosaurus were found in the 1920s but later lost and other fossils discovered in Egypt were destroyed in the bombing of Munich in 1944.

Professor Mike Benton, the student's tutor at Bristol,

said: "It vies with the T-rex as the biggest flesh-eating dinosaur and most people would say it was the bigger of the two."

The monstrous pair would, however, never have come into contact: T-Rex roamed Earth about 30 million years after the Carcharodontosaurus.