The fossilized remains are remarkably well preserved. The skull is just over four feet (127 centimeters) long, while the entire animal would have been about 36 feet long and weighed four metric tons.
Its arms were two feet long, “so it’s literally half the length of the skull, and the animal wouldn’t have been able to reach its mouth,” Makowicki said.
T. rex did not get its small arms from M. gigas. The latter became extinct 20 million years before the former appeared, and the two species were far apart in the evolutionary tree.
Instead, the authors believe that the fact that tyrannosaurids, carcharodontosaurids—the group to which the Meraxes belong—and a third giant carnivore species called abelisaurids evolved small arms indicates certain advantages.
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