Paleontologists Identify a ‘Rapacious’ Velociraptor Relative With Powerful Hands and a Strong Bite

The dinosaur Shri rapax likely relied on its grip strength to take down prey in what is now Mongolia

Sarah Kuta | Daily Correspondent

July 31, 2025

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Roughly 70 million years ago, a six-foot-long dinosaur with strong hands and a powerful bite roamed a landscape of sand dunes and lakes in what is currently Mongolia.

Now, scientists have identified the fearsome creature as a new species called Shri rapax, they reported July 13 in the journal Historical Biology.

S. rapax’s fossilized remains were stolen from an unknown location in the Gobi Desert sometime before 2010. After the skeleton was smuggled out of Mongolia, it ended up in the hands of a French fossil company called Eldonia.

“This case highlights yet another instance of fossil poaching, part of a long-standing pattern of illegal smuggling of fossils from the Mongolian Gobi over the decades,” says study co-author Tsogtbaatar Chinzorig, a paleontologist at the Mongolian Academy of Sciences and North Carolina State University, to National Geographic’s Riley Black.

At some point along the way, the creature’s skull and first four cervical vertebrae went missing. Eventually, after some negotiations with government officials and paleontologists, the company agreed to repatriate what remained of the skeleton to the Mongolian Academy of Sciences. Researchers digitally reconstructed the missing skull and vertebrae based on CT scans of those fossils that had been taken before they disappeared.

Once the team got a closer look at the skeleton, they realized S. rapax had some unusual features.

S. rapax was roughly the same overall size as its well-known relative Velociraptor mongoliensis. However, it had much longer claws. Its middle claw, for instance, measured more than three inches—nearly twice as long as the same claw on the Velociraptor.

The carnivorous S. rapax had stocky arm bones and “extremely robust” hands, which “likely enabled it to grasp and restrain relatively large prey,” Chinzorig tells New Scientist’s Taylor Mitchell Brown.

“The rapacious features we see in the hand signal a predator that relied on pure grip strength rather than slashing kicks,” says co-author Andrea Cau, an independent paleontologist based in Italy, to Earth.com’s Eric Ralls.

S. rapax also had a relatively short snout, which suggests the dinosaur’s bite was powerful—another useful tool for taking down its next meal.

While S. rapax and V. mongoliensis lived in the same place at the same time, paleontologists suspect they led very different lifestyles, based on the variations in their physiology. The authors write that this is an example of “niche partitioning,” a phenomenon in which similar species can co-exist because they pursue different resources or inhabit different parts of the landscape.

Researchers have been able to learn a lot from S. rapax’s incomplete skeleton. However, they hope the lost skull and vertebrae will eventually be returned so they can be reunited with the rest of the bones.

The skull, in particular, would help scientists glean even more about the dinosaur, including deeper insights into “its possible lifestyle and its position in the story of theropod dinosaur evolution,” says James Napoli, a paleontologist and evolutionary biologist at Stony Brook University who was not involved with the research, to New Scientist.

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Sarah Kuta is a writer and editor based in Longmont, Colorado. She covers history, science, travel, food and beverage, sustainability, economics and other topics.