Movies have teasers. Books have sample chapters. And for fossils, there are photos of “unnamed taxa” in presentations and figures shared in hushed corner conversations.

At paleo conferences held over the past few years, I kept seeing glimpses of a strange fossil animal from North Carolina. All that surfaced were images a multi-pronged fossil with a mesh of bone in the center – part of an ancient reptile’s cheek – and the scuttlebutt had it that this was a big, bad carnivore. Today, in the pages of Scientific Reports, paleontologists Lindsay Zanno, Susan Drymala, Sterling Nesbitt, and Vincent Schneider throw back the curtain on the creature and confirm that the rumors were true.

Given that prehistoric predators require titles as impressive as