Saurornitholestes ("lizard-bird thief") is a genus of carnivorous dromaeosaurid theropod dinosaur from the late Cretaceous of Alberta, Montana and New Mexico.
Two species have been named: Saurornitholestes langstoni in 1978 and Saurornitholestes sullivani in 2015. Saurornitholestes was a small bipedal meat-eating dinosaur, equipped with a sickle-claw on the foot.
Like other theropods in the Dromaeosauridae, Saurornitholestes had a long, curving, blade-like claw on the second toe. Saurornitholestes was more long-legged and lightly built than other dromaeosaurids such as Velociraptor and Dromaeosaurus. It resembles Velociraptor in having large, fanglike teeth in the front of the jaws. Saurornitholestes most closely resembles Velociraptor, although the precise relationships of the Dromaeosauridae are still relatively poorly understood.
Saurornitholestes was about 1.8 meters (6 feet) long[10] and weighed approximately 10 kilograms (30 pounds).[11] At the hip it stood 0.6 meters (2 feet), or around as tall as the length of a terrier. Saurornitholestes sullivani is thought to have had a keen sense of smell, due to its skull suggesting an unusually large olfactory bulb.[12]
Habitat[]
Alberta, the location of Saurornitholestes langstoni, had a habitat similar to the United States Middle West being plains[14] and floodplain swamps.[15]
Saurornitholestes appears to have been the most common small theropod in Dinosaur Provincial Park, and teeth and bones are much more common than those of its more massive contemporary, Dromaeosaurus. Little is known about what it ate and how it lived, but a tooth of Saurornitholestes has been found embedded in the wing bone of a large pterosaur, probably a juvenile Quetzalcoatlus.[16] Because the pterosaur was so much larger than Saurornitholestes, Currie and Jacobsen suggest that the theropod was probably scavenging the remains of an already dead animal.[16]
Bite marks from tyrannosaur[]
Aase Roland Jacobsen published a description of a Saurornitholestes dentary in 2001.[17] The dentary is about 12 cm long and preserves fifteen tooth positions, of which only ten preserve teeth.[18] Three toothmarks were visible on the inner "lingual" surface of the dentary.[18] Two of the three marks are series of grooves made by the serrations on the maker's teeth.[18] The striations are between .37 mm and .40 mm thick with cuboidal cross-sections.[19]
The shape of the preserved serrations are too different from those of Saurornitholestes for the marks to be the result of injuries incurred during intraspecific face biting behaviors.[20] Although the right shape for Dromaeosaurus tooth serrations, the preserved marks are too coarse to have been left by that genus.[20] Although a specific identification cannot be made, the most likely perpetrator would be a juvenile individual of one of the Dinosaur Park Formation's tyrannosaurids, like Gorgosaurus, or Daspletosaurus.[21]
Stress fractures[]
In 2001, Bruce Rothschild and others published a study examining evidence for stress fractures and tendon avulsions in theropod dinosaurs and the implications for their behavior. They found that only two of the 82 Saurornitholestes foot bones checked for stress fractures actually had them. Two of the nine hand bones examined for stress fractures were found to have them.[22]