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TEHRAN, Feb 24 -What scientists describe as a miniature tyrannosaur roamed the continent about 96 million years ago, and predated the ferocious beast most know as T. rex.
TEHRAN, Young Journalists Club (YJC) -Scientists have discovered a new tyrannosaur species, a miniature T. rex that roamed North America some 96 million years ago.
The new species, Moros intrepidus, is the oldest Cretaceous tyrannosaur yet found in North America.
The early fossil record has provided evidence of a diversity of medium-sized, primitive tyrannosaurs dating to the Jurassic period, around 150 million years ago. And 80-million-year-old Cretaceous deposits have offered plenty of fossil evidence of large tyrannosaurs.
Until now, paleontologists have learned little of the 70-million-year gap separating the two fossil-rich deposits. The newly discovered species could help scientists better understand how T. rex and its ferocious peers became apex predators.
"When and how quickly tyrannosaurs went from wallflower to prom king has been vexing paleontologists for a long time," Lindsay Zanno, paleontologist at North Carolina State University, said in a news release. "The only way to attack this problem was to get out there and find more data on these rare animals."
Zanno and her colleagues found the new fossil evidence, including teeth and a hind limb, hiding in the rocks of Utah's Upper Cedar Mountain Formation -- deposits dating to the beginning of the Late Cretaceous.
Researchers described the Moros intrepidus fossil in the journal Communications Biology.
Source: upi
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