Dual-digit dinosaur comes with a curse
Fossil search was plagued by mishaps
Maybe this dinosaur really, really didn’t want to be found.
Scientists digging for fossils in rural Argentina found themselves beset by misfortune, ranging from bureaucratic interference to a serious truck accident. The researchers gave an appropriate name to the strange new species they finally discovered: gualicho, the local word for a curse.
If bad luck befalls anyone in the region where the fossil was uncovered, “people say that somebody made a gualicho on you,” says paleontologist Sebastián Apesteguía of the Azara Foundation in Buenos Aires, coauthor of a study in this week’s
PLOS ONE about the new animal. Of all the dinosaurs he’s worked on recently, “this was the most difficult by far.”
Gualicho was found on the second-to-last day of the scientists’ research at the site. Study co-author Peter Makovicky recalls he jokingly ordered one of his workers “to go find something.” Minutes later, “she did.”
What she found was a meateating dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous that stood upright on two slender legs, making it “reasonably speedy,” says Makovicky of The Field Museum in Chicago. It weighed as much as a big Clydesdale and would’ve towered over a 6-foot-tall human.
Gualicho could’ve used a little upper-body work. Its short arms — roughly as long as a child’s — were shriveled and apparently not very useful. The animal probably relied on powerful jaws to grab and grip its quarry.
Its two-fingered “hands” look like those of the formidable T. rex. Tyrannosaurs had stumpy arms, as did a separate clan of upright carnivorous dinosaurs.
Gualicho is on a different branch of the dinosaur family tree, meaning it must have evolved puny arms independently.