Calculations suggest that
Siats meekerorum was at least 30
feet long, making it the third largest predator ever found in North
America. But that’s a conservative estimate because the bones found were
from a juvenile, and a full-grown
Siats (pronounced see-atch)
may have been even bigger, says paleontologist Lindsay Zanno of the
North Carolina Museum of Natural Science, who discovered the species.
“This thing is gigantic,” Zanno said. “There’s simply nothing even
close in this ecosystem to the size of this animal that could’ve been
interpreted as an apex predator.”
The giant dinosaur was discovered in 2008 when Zanno and her
colleague Peter Makovicky of Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History
saw fragments of black fossilized bones poking out of the hills in
Utah’s Cedar Mountain Formation.