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Before there was 40 feet long, 13 feet tall Tyrannosaurus rexthere were smaller tyrants.
In an article published Thursday, February 21 in the journal Nature, paleontologists announced the discovery of a diminutive ancestor of T. rex (pdf), after finding his posterior bones and some teeth in Utah. The tiny rex would have been between 3 and 4 feet tall and was about the size of a modern deer. A teacup rex, if you want.
Paleontologists at North Carolina State University, the Field Museum in Chicago and Stellenbosch University in South Africa named this boyfriend Morphs Intrépidus, meaning "annunciator of misfortune". In this case, the "misfortune" he has brought is the T. rex, which will result in the next 15 million years.
The smallest Tyrannosaurus would have been light and fast, able to defeat a prey without becoming a prey.
He lived 96 million years ago, during the Cretaceous, when Utah was a lush, lush, and deltaic environment. Until now, this period was a blank page in the paleontological history of tyrannosaurs; The fossils of the dinosaur group had a 70-million-year-old moat, which means that paleontologists were not sure of the dinosaur's earlier evolutionary lineage, which would later become the undisputed supreme predator of North America.
"Since when and how tyrannosaurs have gone from wallflower to Prom King, paleontologists have long been upset," Lindsay Zanno, lead author of the journal and head of paleontology at the North Carolina Museum of Sciences, said in a statement. "The only way to tackle this problem was to go out and find more data on these rare animals."
Zanno was looking for tyrannosaurus bones in the area for a decade to try to supplement the fossil record. the Moros Discovery was the ultimate prize for this research and was right next to the place where Zanno, also a paleontologist from North Carolina State University, had discovered Siats meekerorum, carcharodontosaurus giant meat eater, in 2013.
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