THE KING'S YOUNGER KIN
Finds of Bistahieversor are extremely few: three more or less complete skeletons and a couple of stray knucklebones. The bones were first discovered in New Mexico. The skeletons of these species scarcely differ from one another, and a dilettante might suppose that Bistahieversor was simply underdeveloped because in its day it sat at home too much, watching the diplodocuses at their copulations and pulling its pud. Though with arms that tiny, one could hardly manage it, I suppose.
The name comes from the adobe formations, "bistahi" (in the Navajo language), which gave their name to the Bisti badlands. Eversor is Latin for "destroyer".
Bistahieversor reached a height of 9 metres, against the 12 metres of the tyrannosaurs. It lived 74 million years ago. The skull in the photograph is fitted with 64 teeth. Tyrannosaurs had 54 teeth, and lived 10 million years later. It follows that Bistahieversor lost one tooth every million years.
It is supposed that Bistahieversor and the tyrannosaurs lived in isolation from one another, on territories divided by the Rocky Mountains, and so did not hang out together, though they may have descended from the same mummy.
Like Tyrannosaurus rex, Bistahieversor belongs to the order Saurischia, or "lizard-hipped" dinosaurs. The order originally took its name from a characteristic feature, the forward-tilted pubic bones. Hence the ridiculous gait.
