Meat-eating dinosaurs roamed Japan

Japanese researchers have discovered fossils fragments of a prehistoric carnivorous dinosaur in a layer of earth, which is about 84 million years old, in Nagasaki.
The two fossilised tooth fragments are believed to be from a dinosaur that was more than 7 meters long, officials at the Fukui Prefectural Dinosaur Museum and the Nagasaki city board of education said.
However, it is difficult to identify the species from just the fragments, they said.
One of the fragments, measuring 35.4 mm by 26.8 mm by 11.2 mm, forms roughly half of an estimated 6-cm-long tooth from the root, Kyodo News agency reported.

The fossil is one of the largest carnivorous dinosaur's tooth ever found in Japan. The other fragment is 34.2 mm long and 13.6 mm wide.
Sharp protrusions show they were the teeth of a carnivore, the officials said.

The fossils were discovered in July 2011 in the Mitsuze layer on the west coast of the Nagasaki Peninsula by Kazunori Miyata, chief researcher at the museum.
The finding extended the known range of carnivorous dinosaurs to 13 prefectures in Japan, from Iwate in the northeast to Kagoshima in the southwest.
The Mitsuze layer, which is believed to have been formed in the late Cretaceous Period about 84 million years ago, has been a rich source of fossils, Miyata said.