TO the fans of pop bands like Oasis and Westlife, they are the dinosaurs of rock.

Even American scientists found that whenever Dire Straits was played, more and more fossils turned up.

However, far from taking the hump, Mark Knopfler, the Dire Straits guitarist, said yesterday that he was ''delighted and honoured'' to be called a dinosaur - masiakasaurus knopfleri to be pedantic.

American scientists called the creature masiakasaurus knopfleri after listening to Knopfler's music while searching for its bones in Madagascar. Dem bones just kept on coming and, in gratitude, the team decided to name the 65 million-year-old two-legged predator after their guitar hero.

The first part of the dinosaur's name is derived from masiaka, the Madagascan word for vicious, and sauros, the Greek for lizard.

Knopfler, who played his way to fame in the 1970s, said: ''I'm really delighted. It's a very special honour. The fact that it's a dinosaur is certainly apt, but I'm happy to report that I'm not in the least bit vicious.''

The creature, about 6ft long with peculiar teeth and jaws, was unearthed near the village of Berivotra in northwestern

Madagascar.

The dinosaur hunters dug up a number of isolated bones from several individuals.

Dr Scott Sampson, the expedition leader from the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, said: ''Finding fossils entails a heavy dose of serendipity, and we'll take good luck any way we can get it.''

Apart from its name, the masiakasaurus possesses a number of other unusual features.

Its teeth and jaws are highly specialised, the first tooth of the lower jaw being almost horizontal and projecting forward instead of upward.

Subsequent teeth angle increasingly upward until they all point straight up. Whereas the creature's back teeth are flattened and serrated, like those of other meat-eating dinosaurs, the front ones are long and almost conical.

Dr Sampson said: ''When we dug up the first lower jaw bone, we weren't even sure it belonged to a dinosaur. It was only after we compared it with the lower jaws of other carnivorous dinosaurs that we became convinced as to the nature of its owner.''

A few species of living mammals, including various shrews and a group of South American marsupials have a similar dental arrangement.

In these animals, the forward-projecting front teeth are used for grasping and piercing prey, mostly insects.

Masiakasaurus probably used its front teeth in a similar way to capture and manipulate small creatures such as insects, fish, lizards, snakes and mammals.

The dinosaur is related to majungatholus atopus, a much bigger 30ft predator, which also lived in Madagascar. Both are members of a group of dinosaurs known as abelisauroids, found only in the southern hemisphere.

Madagascar was once part of a southern supercontinent called Gondwana, which fragmented millions of years ago.

The fact that similar dinosaurs have been found in South America, India and Madagascar suggests that the regions remained connected longer than scientists had previously thought.