Abelisaurus
Name	Abelisaurus
Class	Abelisauridae
Name Translation	Named after Roberto Abel
Period	Late Cretaceous
Location	Argentina
Diet	Meat
Length	25-30 ft (7.5-9 m)

The large theropod Abelisaurus comahuensis, from Patagonia, Argentina, looked like Albertosaurus from Alberta, Canada especially in it's size and lifestyle. It was a bipedal carnivore that probably reached 7 to 9 meters (25 to 30 feet) in length, although it is known from only one partial skull. But it's skull led two Argentinian paleontologists to put it in it's own family now known as the Abelisaurida.

PaleobiologyEdit

It has been considered to be more closely related to theropod Ceratosaurus from the Jurassic Period. Only the skull of Abelisaurus been found, but its body proportions were probably similar to other large theropods with the same size skulls (three feet long). Carnotaurus had slender legs with the front shorter than the back. Since Carnotaurus probably was an early abelisaurid, scientists suppose that Abelisaurus also had short front limbs and slender legs. Other details of its body are unknown. The discovery of Abelisaurus is important because it shed light on many different southern-hemisphere theropods that are known only from fragmentary and puzzling material. These remains were difficutlt to identify and were occasionally used to suggest that late Cretaceous tyrannosaurids fromt the northern hemisphere were in the southern hemisphere. Now that good abelisaurid material has been discovered and described, sceintists have learned that many of those remains were abelisaurids. The possibility of southern-hemisphere tyrannosaurids is less likely.

ReferencesEdit

• 1. Picture of Abelisaurus [1]
• 2. Main Information Credits to "ROMTECH" Computer CD Dinosaur Discovery