(This is a couple of days late for Halloween, but since this October saw the description of a new dinosaur species with a particularly spooky name, I couldn’t resist putting it into the schedule anyway.)
Spectrovenator ragei was an early member of the abelisaurid lineage, living in southeastern Brazil during the Early Cretaceous, about 120 million years ago. It was one of the smallest known abelisaurids, measuring just 2m long (6’6″), and lacked a lot of the skull specializations seen in larger-bodied Late Cretaceous forms like Carnotaurus, suggesting it was more of a generalist predator.
Its genus name translates to “ghost hunter” due to it being found underneath the fossil remains of another dinosaur entirely – a “ghost” unexpectedly appearing when the specimen was being prepared – but it’s extra appropriate since it also helps to fill in a rather sizeable ghost lineage in the fossil record of abelisaurids.