Carnotaurus

Chapter • Meet the dinosaur

Overview

Carnotaurus was a heavily built predatory dinosaur that looked like nothing else in the fossil record. Its skull was short, deep and blunt, almost bulldog-like, and above each eye sat a thick, outward-pointing horn – the feature that gave the animal its name, which means roughly "meat-eating bull". The neck was powerfully muscled, the hind limbs long and slender, and the tail unusually deep and stiff. The arms, in contrast, were almost absurdly reduced: the forearm was extremely short, the four-fingered hand had no proper claws, and the elbow could barely bend. Large patches of skin impressions preserved along the body show small pebbly scales with rows of larger, cone-shaped feature scales running along the flanks. There is no evidence of feathers in abelisaurids, so modern reconstructions show Carnotaurus as a scaly animal walking horizontally with its tail held clear of the ground.

Chapter • Where it lived

Habitat

Carnotaurus lived roughly 72–70 million years ago, in the Late Cretaceous (Maastrichtian), in what is now Chubut Province, Patagonia, Argentina. The only known skeleton, MACN-CH 894, was collected by José Bonaparte's team in 1984 from the La Colonia Formation and described the following year. The La Colonia rocks record a low coastal plain of tidal channels, meandering rivers, lagoons and salt-influenced wetlands along the shore of a shallow sea that flooded northern Patagonia at the time. Carnotaurus shared this landscape with turtles, snakes, early mammals, titanosaurian sauropods and other predators, under a warm climate with pronounced dry seasons.

Chapter • Wild behavior

Behavior & Ecology

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Chapter • Scientific place

Taxonomy