Meat-eating dino fossils found in Argentina

Ferocious carnivores related to the Velociraptors immortalized in the movie Jurassic Park may have roamed both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, researchers say.

Paleontologists Fernando Novas and Diego Pol describe a new species of dinosaur in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.

The meat-eater, called Neuquenraptor argentinus, was about two metres long and lived in South America.

The name means robber of the Neuquen province of northeast Patagonia. The size and shape of N. argentinus resembles Velociraptor mongoliensis, but a toe bone suggests the Argentine dino may have been a better runner.

"The new discovery demonstrates that Cretaceous theropod faunas from the southern continents shared greater similarity with those of the northern landmasses than previously thought," the pair wrote.

Both deinonychosaurs were small, lightly built dinosaurs with deadly teeth and a distinctive sickle-shaped claw suited to disembowelling larger dinosaurs.

The group of theropod dinosaurs are thought to be the ones most closely related to birds.

Novas, from the Argentine Museum of Natural Sciences in Buenos Aires, said the South American dino lived about 80 million years ago, a time when the two continents had long separated.

The findings therefore suggest deinonychosaurs roamed far and wide during the Cretaceous period.