The Fisher King

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Here's one fellow you wouldn't like to meet in a dark alley: 36 feet long, built like a T. rex, a hundred teeth sharp as razors, claws the size of your foot. He's Suchomimus tererensis, an entirely new breed of dinosaur to be unveiled Friday in the journal Science. Suchomimus was discovered -– bit by fossilized bit -– by paleontologist Paul Sereno in Niger, Africa, last year. Now that he's been shipped whole to the States, the world will hear him roar. "With its forearms and its jaws, it would have been able to take down just about anything," said Sereno, a professor at the University of Chicago. "It was the dominant predator of its time."

And that means paleontologists everywhere are going to have to rethink the whole spinosaur family of dinosaur that Suchomimus belonged to. Is he the direct ancestor of modern crocodiles, for example? He has pretty much the same jaw and teeth: "It was built for snaring and swallowing," said Sereno. Strangely enough, with all that equipment, Suchomimus did nothing more dominant than hunt for fish. But if you think that makes him a weenie, just remember: The body Sereno found was not even fully grown.