A tiny tyrannosaur

When you think of Tyrannosaurus rex, a small set of striking physical traits comes to mind: an oversized skull with powerful jaws, tiny forearms, and the muscular hind legs of a runner. But, researchers have just unearthed a much smaller tyrannosauroid in China, no more than three meters long, that displays all the same features – and it predates the T. rex by tens of millions of years.

This finding, published online by the journal Science at the Science Express website on September 17, means that such specialized physical features did not evolve as the prehistoric predators grew in size. Instead, they were present for feeding efficiency at all sizes of the dinosaurs during their reign in the Cretaceous Period.

Paul Sereno from the University of Chicago and National Geographic explorer-in-residence, along with colleagues, studied the new, small-bodied fossil, naming it Raptorex kriegsteini, and estimated that it was a young adult when it died. They examined the skull, teeth, nose, spine, shoulders, forearms, pelvis, and hind legs of the new fossil, comparing the features to larger evolutionary versions of tyrannosauroid dinosaurs.

"First, we used the best mechanical preparation of the specimen possible, which entails the finest needles and air abrasives under a microscope," Sereno said in an email interview. "Then we made molds and casts of the cranial bones, assembled a cast skull, and sent that skull through a CT scanner at the University of Chicago hospital to get the snout cross-section… We used silicone on the skull roof to cast the forebrain of R. kriegsteini… Finally, I made a thin-section from one femur, or thigh bone, for microscopic examination, and determined that the individual had lived to be five or six years old."

The researchers conclude that the "predatory skeletal design" of R. kriegsteini was simply scaled up with little modification in its carnivorous descendants, whose body masses eventually grew 90 times greater.

Sereno and his colleagues also use this new fossil to propose and describe three major morphological stages in the evolutionary history of tyrannosauroid dinosaurs.

Source : American Association for the Advancement of Science