Field Museum Scientist Helps Discover Dinosaur That Terrorized T-Rex

CHICAGO (CBS) -- Were the Siats meekerorum in Spielberg's Jurassic Park, you have to wonder if any of the characters would have made it off the island alive.

Siats meekerorum is a new species of carnivorous dinosaur recently discovered by Lindsay Zanno, a North Carolina State University paleontologist, and Peter Makovicky, a paleontologist from the Field Museum of Natural History.

Most interestingly, Siats meekerorum was top dog (or dinosaur) in its day, even keeping tyrannosaurs in their place.

"It's been 63 years since a predator of this size has been named from North America," says Lindsay Zanno, who's also the lead author of a Nature Communications paper describing the find. "You can't imagine how thrilled we were to see the bones of this behemoth poking out of the hillside."

Zanno and Makovicky found the partial skeleton in Utah's Mountain Formation in 2008. While Siats is named after a cannibalistic man-eating monster from Ute tribal legend, meekerorum acknowledges the Meeker family for their support of paleontologists at the Field Museum.

Read more about the Siats meekerorum at K-HiTS Chicago.