Ozraptor
Name: Ozraptor
(Oz thief - from the word ‘Ozzies’, a nickname for
Australians).
Phonetic: Oz-rap-tor.
Named By: John Albert Long & Ralph Molnar
- 1998.
Classification: Chordata, Reptilia, Dinosauria,
Saurischia, Theropoda, Abelisauroidea.
Species: O. subotaii (type).
Diet: Carnivore.
Size: Uncertain due to incomplete remains, but
comparison to other remains has yielded an estimate of two meters long.
Known locations: Australia.
Time period: Bajocian of the Jurassic.
Fossil representation: Lower portion of the left
tibia, one of the lower leg bones.
It’s
hard to imagine how a dinosaur can be named from just a single portion
of a leg bone, but this is what happened with Ozraptor.
Although
incomplete, in 2005 the palaeontologist Oliver Rauhut noted that
this tibia does have a vertical median ridge on the astragalar groove.
Previously Ozraptor was labelled as an unknown
theropod but this
feature suggests that it was actually an abelisaur.
Additionally
since it is known from the mid Jurassic, this would make Ozraptor
the
earliest known abelisaur, existing long before the more famous forms
of Carnotaurus,
Abelisaurus
and Aucasaurus
which lived towards the
end of the Cretaceous.
If
this classification is correct, as well as the two meter size
estimate, then this also suggests that the abelisaurs just like the
tyrannosaurs started out very small and then grew larger as they
displaced existing predators. Future fossil discoveries may yet
reveal a picture of larger but more primitive predatory dinosaurs like
Australovenator
being dominant on the landscape during the early
Cretaceous but losing ground to abelisaurs later on, something that
seems to have happened upon other southern continents during the
Mesozoic.
The
species name of O. subotaii is derived from the
character of Subotai
from the 1982 film Conan the Barbarian which
was based upon the stories of Robert E. Howard.
Further reading
- A new Jurassic theropod dinosaur from Western Australia. - Records of
the Western Australian Museum 19 (1): 221-229. - J. A. Long &
R. E. Molnar - 1998.
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