London experts discover Thunder Thighs dinosaur

Fossil hunters from the capital have discovered a new species of dinosaur they have dubbed "thunder thighs".

They say the Brontomerus mcintoshi, a 14m long, six tonne plant eating beast, used its hugely powerful thighs to fight.

It could deliver a kick nearly three times as powerful as that from similar-sized sauropods, a weapon that males may also have unleashed on each other when fighting over females in the early Cretaceous, researchers said.

"It may be that males lined up next to each other, side by side, and kicked the crap out of each other," said Mike Taylor, a palaeontologist and lead author on the study at University College London.

"When we recognised the weird shape of the hip, we wondered what its significance might be, but we concluded that kicking was the most likely."
Bones, including a hip bone, a shoulder blade and a rib, belonging to an adult and a juvenile were unearthed at a quarry near the Colorado river in Grand County, Utah, in 1994, but palaeontologists had failed to appreciate their significance until now.

"This tells us that sauropod evolution was going in new directions and exploring many more different niches than we were aware of before," said Taylor.

Details of the discovery are reported in the journal, Acta Palaeontologica Polonica.