This
tyrannosaur may have been buried under water, either in a river or from floodwaters, which would account for why it was mostly in one piece, including a nearly complete skull.
It "captures
tyrannosaurs at a key point in their evolutionary transformation," notes Lawrence Witmer, who studies the soft tissues of dinosaur heads at Ohio University, Athens.
Analyzed against a database of other
tyrannosaur skulls, the braincase shows that T.
Palaeontologists had been uncertain about the existence of long-snouted
tyrannosaurs until the "remarkably well-preserved" remains of the dinosaur - whose scientific name is Qianzhousaurus sinensis - were unearthed.
The newly found ancient predator looked very different from most other
tyrannosaurs.
Since the discovery, experts have created a new branch of the
tyrannosaur family for specimens with very long snouts.
Guanlong shows us how the small coelurosaurian ancestors of
tyrannosaurs took the first step that led to T-rex almost 100 million years later," said James M Clark of George Washington University.
1 The
tyrannosaur fossil found recently in Liaoning sported
Tyrannosaurs were large meat-eating dinosaurs that grew to lengths of 47 feet (14.
The paleontologists who unearthed the 130-million-year-old fossils in northeastern China announced in October that their find provides the first direct evidence that
tyrannosaurs had protofeathers.
html) Los Alamos National Laboratory reported, calling the work the highest resolution scan scientists have ever taken of a
tyrannosaur.
One of the more thoughtful figures in the film industry, he's now written and directed the startling
Tyrannosaur.
