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Science correspondent, BBC News
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Scientists have discovered a new species of dinosaur – in the collection of a Mongolian museum – that they say “rewrites” the evolutionary history of tyrannosaurs.
Researchers concluded that two 86 million-year-old skeletons they studied belonged to a species that is now the closest known ancestor of all tyrannosaurs – the group of predators that includes the iconic T.rex.
The researchers named the species Khankhuuluu (pronounced khan-KOO-loo) mongoliensis, meaning Dragon Prince of Mongolia.
The discovery, published in Nature, is a window into how tyrannosaurs evolved to become powerful predators that terrorised North America and Asia until the end of the reign of the dinosaurs.
“‘Prince’ refers to this being an early, smaller tyrannosauroid,” explained Prof Darla Zelenitsky, a palaeontologist from the University of Calgary in Canada. Tyrannosauroids are the superfamily of carnivorous dinosaurs that walked on two legs.
The first tyrannosauroids though were tiny.
PhD student Jared Voris, who led the research with Prof Zelenitsky, explained: “They were these really small, fleet-footed predators that lived in the shadows of other apex predatory dinosaurs.”
Khankhuuluu represents an evolutionary shift – from those small hunters that scampered around during the Jurassic period – to the formidable giants, including T.rex.
It would have weighed about 750kg, while an adult T.rex could have weighed as much as eight times that, so “this is a transitional [fossil],” explained Prof Zelenitsky, “between earlier ancestors and the mighty tyrannosaurs”.
“It has helped
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