2024-01-11 20:18:59
Published11. January 2024, 9:18 p.m
Fossil research: skull bone turns out to be T-Rex’s big sister
When researchers re-examined a partial skull that was identified as a T-Rex, researchers came to a different conclusion.
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Researchers have identified the T-Rex’s big sister: Tyrannosaurus mcraeensis.
Sergei Krasinski
The new dinosaur species was identified from a partial skull.
Nature/Scientific Reports
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For a long time, parts of a dinosaur skull were thought to be those of a T-Rex.
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A reassessment comes to the conclusion that this is a new Tyrannosaurus species.
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The Tyrannosaurus mcraeensis lived approximately seven million years before the T-Rex.
Forty years ago, a partial dinosaur skull was discovered in southern Mexico. Researchers have now discovered that the prehistoric animal is a new species of Tyrannosaurus and possibly a close relative of the T-Rex.
The skull was originally categorized as part of a T-Rex, according to a report published by Nature Journal. However, Anthony Fiorillo and his colleagues at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science recognized differences from the bones.
differences
As the “New Scientist” writes, the researchers suspect that the specimen is an ancestor of the T-Rex. They named it Tyrannosaurus mcraeensis. They estimate that the dinosaur was around twelve meters long and lived around seven million years before the T-Rex.
As Fiorillo says, the differences between the two dinosaur species are not very big. For example, the skull of T-Mcraeensis is slimmer than that of its big sister.
Jared Voris from the University of Calgary in Canada is therefore critical of the discovery. “I hesitate to consider Tyrannosaurus mcraeensis as anything other than a T-Rex,” he is quoted as saying by New Scientist. Many of the anatomical features can also be found in the T-Rex.
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