Carnotaurus recently featured in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, where it battles with the old T-rex. Carnotaurus, whose name literally means ‘meat eating bull”. While it doesn’t look like it, the fearsome looking carnivore could sprint up to speeds of 35 mph. The Carnotaurus belonged to the Abelisauridae, a group of meat-eating dinosaurs whose ancestors branched off from the rest of the theropods (meat-eating dinos) in the Early Jurassic.
The abelisaurs were members of Neoceratosauria, a group of dinosaurs that originated in the Jurassic Period. This was one major group of theropods; the other was the Tetanurae, which included most major carnivorous dinos, such as the raptors, T-rex, Allosaurus, Spinosaurus, and all the birds. Neoceratosauria included the abelisaurs, the elaphrosaurs, the noasaurs and the ceratosaurs. The tetanurans were marked by stiffened tails lending them their name and a loss of the fourth finger.
Carnotaurus lived in South America in the Late Cretaceous alongside huge allosaurs such as Giganotosaurus and Mapusaurus. These killers probably hunted in packs to take down the huge sauropods that grazed the South American plains. Carnotaurus was not alone in its family, either. Abelisaurus and Aucasaurus were two other cousins.
Well, now we finally get to it. The title says it all – Carnotaurus had even tinier arms than T-rex. Unlike T-rex, these were vestigial and had no use at all. The arm bones were pretty robust, but the hands were nearly nonexistent and wimpy. Carnotaurus’s main tool was its thick and powerful tail, used for sprinting, and its fearsome head. With this, it chomp down on anything that roamed its territory!
Anay Ganesh 