Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, September 21, 1995                   TAG: 9509210084
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The Boston Globe
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

BONES OF DINOSAUR BIGGER THAN T. REX FOUND IN ARGENTINA

The fearsome Tyrannosaurus rex has been toppled from its perch as the largest meat-eating dinosaur, replaced by an even bigger predator found in Argentina: a 42-foot-long, 6- to 8-ton behemoth called Giganotosaurus carolinii.

The first bones of the new king of the prehistoric beasts, which lived about 100 million years ago, were found in 1993 by an amateur fossil hunter, Reuben Carolini. Its skull, backbone, pelvis and leg bones were subsequently excavated by two Argentine paleontologists, who described the find in a report published today in the journal Nature.

The report says the titanic predator is ``the largest therapod ever recorded from the Southern Hemisphere and is probably the world's biggest predatory dinosaur.'' It was written by Rodolfo Coria of the Carmen Funes museum in Neuquen, Argentina, and Leonardo Saigado of Argentina's National University of Comahue.

Coria and Saigado said the shattered skull bones of the new dinosaur, parts of which are missing, make it impossible to make an exact comparison between the size of its head and that of Tyrannosaurus. But its thigh bone is about 2 inches longer than that of T. rex, and all its bones are ``more robust,'' indicating it was much heavier.

The two giant meat-eaters evolved independently of each other, the authors said, indicating that enormous size may be a feature that evolved in response to similar environmental conditions in the ecosystems inhabited by the two hunters.

``Large carnivorous animals ... are rare,'' the authors wrote, ``and flesh-eating dinosaurs were rarer still.''

The same fossil site in the Patagonian region of Argentina also has yielded bones of one of the largest plant-eating dinosaurs ever found, called Argentinosaurus. Both of these Argentine giants thrived when most giant dinosaurs had already died out in the Northern Hemisphere - and 30 million years before T. rex evolved.

The find was described earlier this year in the Globe, but at the time it had not yet been described in the scientific press.