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BY NATHAN GIANNINI
ANCHOR LAUREN GORES
Paleontologists have given a dinosaur fossil discovered in Morocco in 2007 an eye-catching
name. Slate has the details.
“The 40-foot behemoth, Sauroniops Pachytholus, is named after the Eye of Sauron from The
Lord of the Rings because it’s only been identified so far by a single skull fossil
that included a large eye socket.”
The meat-eating species, as large as a Tyrannosaurus rex, reportedly roamed North Africa around
95 million years ago. National Geographic notes, researchers were intrigued by a small
dome protruding from the skull above the eye opening, which set this particular dinosaur
apart from similar species.
“This lumpy growth may have been used for head-butting clashes during male mating displays,
the team speculates.”
Smithsonian Magazine notes not much else is known about the species due to the limited
available materials to test.
What we DO know: “The size of the frontal ... indicates that the dinosaur probably exceeded
thirty feet in length. The carnivore was probably just as big as the better-known Carcharodontosaurus,
which it lived alongside, but such estimates always await the test of more fossils.”