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1Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minute2Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problems3Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitchesThe headline refers to Ulughbegsaurus uzbekistanensis, a large dinosaur known from a fossil found in Uzbekistan. Scientists estimated it was 7.5–8 meters long and weighed more than 1,000 kilograms—but the evidence does not support the claim that it was five times bigger than Tyrannosaurus rex. Its size was striking compared with the smaller carnivores known from its own ecosystem, including the tyrannosauroid Timurlengia.
What predator is the headline about?
Ulughbegsaurus uzbekistanensis was named in a 2021 scientific description based on a fossil from the Bissekty Formation of Uzbekistan. The fossil is about 90 million years old, according to the University of Tsukuba’s announcement.
The 2021 authors classified it as a carcharodontosaurian—a group of large predatory dinosaurs—and interpreted it as the apex predator of the local ecosystem. That classification is not settled: a 2022 paper questioned whether the fossil has unambiguous features establishing that group and concluded that its relationships remained uncertain.
How big was Ulughbegsaurus?
The 2021 description estimated Ulughbegsaurus at 7.5–8 meters long, with a body mass greater than 1,000 kilograms. These are estimates, not measurements from a complete skeleton. The species was described from one isolated left maxilla, the upper jawbone; researchers use the size of such bones to estimate body size because maxilla size correlates with femur length in theropods.
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Was Ulughbegsaurus bigger than T. rex?
No. The “five times bigger than T. rex” comparison is unsupported. The published size estimate for Ulughbegsaurus does not establish that it was larger than Tyrannosaurus rex, much less five times larger. The meaningful comparison in the original account is with carnivorous dinosaurs known from the same Bissekty Formation ecosystem, including the smaller tyrannosauroid Timurlengia.
Those comparisons answer different questions: an estimate of an animal’s length or mass is not interchangeable with a comparison of its place in a particular food web. Ulughbegsaurus was described as much larger than other carnivores then known from its local formation; that does not make it larger than every later predator.
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What does the fossil tell us about its ecosystem?
The find supports the interpretation that a large predator lived alongside smaller tyrannosauroids and dromaeosaurids in the Bissekty ecosystem. The 2021 authors proposed that those smaller carnivores were mesopredators, while Ulughbegsaurus occupied the apex-predator role.
Senior author Yoshitsugu Kobayashi described the coexistence as relevant to the changing apex-predator niche in the Late Cretaceous. It is evidence for a predator community in transition, not proof that Ulughbegsaurus directly stopped tyrannosaurs from evolving larger bodies. The available sources also do not establish a specific cause for the animal’s disappearance.
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How certain is its classification?
The original 2021 paper placed Ulughbegsaurus among carcharodontosaurians. In 2022, a paper in Geological Magazine argued that the fragmentary maxilla lacks unambiguous diagnostic traits for that group; it also raised the possibility that some purported traits could be effects of fossilization or features shared with dromaeosaurids. That reassessment left the fossil’s precise evolutionary relationships uncertain.
Because the identification rests on one jawbone and the classification was challenged, it is more accurate to call Ulughbegsaurus a proposed carcharodontosaurian in the original description than to present that placement as a settled consensus.
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Sources
- Tanaka et al., “A new carcharodontosaurian theropod dinosaur from the Upper Cretaceous of Uzbekistan,” Royal Society Open Science (2021).
- University of Tsukuba, announcement of the Ulughbegsaurus discovery (2021).
- 2022 reassessment of the fossil’s phylogenetic relationships, Geological Magazine.
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