Episode 23 is all about Giganotosaurus carolinii, a predator from South America.

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In this episode, we discuss:

• The dinosaur of the day: Giganotosaurus carolinii
• Not to be confused with Gigantosaurus, a sauropod discovered in England
• Name means “giant southern lizard”
• Carolinii name came from Ruben Carolini, an amateur fossil hunter who found Giganotosaurus in the Rio Limay Formation of Patagonia in 1993
• First described in the journal Nature, by paleontologists Rodolfo Coria and Leonardo Salgado in 1995 (thought to be the largest carnivorous dinosaur at the time)
• Giganotosaurus was found near Villa el Chocon, which now has a Giganotosaurus statue beside the road
• First skeleton found was 70% complete, and included the skull, pelvis, leg bones and most of the backbone (was 6.5 tons, 13 feet tall at hip, 40-41 feet long)
• A second Giganotosaurus skeleton was estimated to be 8% bigger (43 feet long and 8 tons)
• Giganotosaurus about 100 to 90 million years ago, during the mid Cretaceous time
• It had a small brain for its size (size of a banana), but had a good sense of smell
• Skull was about 6 feet long
• Giganotosaurus had sharp, 8-inch teeth with serrated edges, three-fingered “hands” and two short arms, and a thin, pointed tail
• Also was bipedal, with powerful legs that could move up to 31 mph; could turn quickly while running
• May have hunted titanosaurids, like Argentinosaurus; other titanosaurs found near Giganotosaurus were Andesaurus and Limaysaurus
• Would not have been able to take on an adult alone; may have hunted in packs to take down large prey
• Used its teeth to slice through prey (common to its family carcharodontosaurids); bones of Argentinosaurus were too large to crunch with teeth, so Giganotosaurus would have had to bite on softer tissue, raking across the flesh
• Then it could wait for the Argentinosaurus to lose blood of be infected and die (may have targeted leg muscles to sever a tendon and cripple the titanosaur)
• Seven skeletons of Mapusaurus, a close cousin that looked similar, where found in the same area as Giganotosaurus (means they died near each other, but raises the possibility that they lived in a community)
• Giganotosaurus rescued the protagonists in James Gureny’s Dinotopia from a T-rex
• Giganotosaurus is also in the 5th Land Before Time movie, and in the 2008 movie Journey to the Center of the Earth
• Carcharodontosaurids means “shark-toothed lizards” and they were a group of carnivorous theropods
• Ernst Stromer named the Carcharodontosauridae family in 1931
• Some Carcharodontosaurids include Giganotosaurus, Mapusaurus, Carcharodontosaurus, and Tyrannotitan, which were all similar in size or slightly bigger than T-rex
• In 2006, when Mapusaurus was discovered, Rodolfo Coria and Phil Currie named a subfamily of Carcharodontosauridae, called Giganotosaurinae, for the most advanced species from South America (which were more closely related than the ones from Africa and Europe)
• Fun fact: 99% of all species are extinct (10-14 million are around today)