#teratophoneus

Merry day twenty-eight of Dino-December! Today's animal of the day is Teratophoneus curriei!

Image credit: Creative Beast Studio

This species of mid-sized tyrannosaurid lived during the Late Cretaceous period in what is now Utah. The original holotype specimen was found in the Kaiparowits Formation and was pretty fragmentary, consisting of bits of a broken skull and a few other pieces of bone. This individual is believed to have been a subadult and was around 20 ft long when it died. However, since the animal probably wasn't fully grown at the time of its death, it's likely that the maximum size of Teratophoneus was a bit larger, at around 26 ft long. The skull of Teratophoneus is around 23% shorter in proportion to closely related dinosaurs like Albertosaurus and was also slightly deeper. It's theorized that this may have allowed Teratophoneus to have stronger jaw muscles, giving it a strong bite force. But that's just speculation.

Image credit: cisiopurple on DeviantArt

Since the discovery of the holotype specimen in 2008, several more Teratophoneus specimens have been discovered. One of these fossils is a bonebed discovered in 2021 that's made up of around 4 or 5 individuals ranging in age from 4 to 22 years old. Since these dinosaurs all likely died at the same time, probably due to a flashflood, this seems to suggest that Teratophoneus may have lived and hunted in family groups. This isn't the first species of tyrannosaur found in such a group, with Albertosaurus and Daspletosaurus also being found in similar groupings. It's possible that these individuals weren't actually living together and just so happened to end up in the same general location after they died. For example, if they had all been washed to the same place by the aforementioned flashflood. But since this has happened multiple times for multiple different species/genera of tyrannosaurs, the theory that at least the smaller species of tyrannosaurids hunted in packs is looking more and more likely.

Image credit: Sergey Krasovskiy

The genus name Teratophoneus is Greek for "murderous monster" since, while it wasn't the largest tyrannosaur around, this dinosaur was still likely a ferocious predator. Meanwhile, its species name honors paleontologist Philip J. Currie, who was not one of the paleontologists to discover this species. That credit goes to Thomas Carr, Thomas Williamson, Brooks Britt, and Ken Stadtman, who must all be fans of Currie. It would make sense since apparently, he was one of Michael Crichton's inspirations for the character Alan Grant in his novel, Jurassic Park. Of course, he's also made a ton of contributions to the field of paleontology, including naming/describing a bunch of new species and even debunking some paleontological scams and hoaxes.

Image credit: Universal Studios (Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom)

Photo credit: StudioADI

Starting Off Small

Gazing upon the skull of this land's apex predator, this young Parasaurolophus knows little of the dangers of its world and how lucky it must be to survive its first year.

Oh… the teratophoneins… what a theropod group…

Just a WIP of something I'm working on. All I need to do now is the shading.

So, this is interesting! The basic concept here is that there’s been speculation for a few decades now that tyrannosaurids could have been social or semi-social animals that moved and hunted in groups, a theory primarily based on the occasional discoveries of mass death sites where large numbers of these creatures were all in one spot and died at the same time. In this case, either four or five specimens of Teratophoneus (a genus of tyrannosaurs that lived about ten million years before the famous one) seem to have all died together during a flood.

Social behavior is something that has evolved multiple times among different organisms, since it tends to be advantageous for both predators (who can cooperate in bringing down tougher or more elusive prey and in defending against other hunters) and prey (there’s safety in having a lot of pals to stand with or get lost among when something’s hunting you). Thus, since it’s generally accepted that dinosaurs were comparatively intelligent and active animals, it’s thought that it would have been likely that social behavior arose among them as well.

The primary arguments against this theory are that these mass death sites aren’t especially common (this is the third found since 1910) and that they don’t necessarily show that these creatures always lived in groups. Essentially, the sites only strictly show that these creatures died together, not that they lived together -- it’s possible, for instance, that they only gathered together because of environmental stresses such as a lack of food driving them to unusual behaviors. Whether they were solitary outside of these instances or whether they spent all their lives together isn’t something that the fossils can show us.