A tiny mystery dinosaur from New Mexico is officially T. rex's cousin

[Judi Lynn]

It took decades to ID the 92-million-year-old tyrannosaur, newly named Suskityrannus hazelae

BY MARIA TEMMING 1:33PM, MAY 7, 2019



MISSING LINK A newly identified dinosaur species called Suskityrannus hazelae (illustrated) offers a glimpse into the evolution of apex predators like Tyrannosaurus rex just before they got really big


More than 20 years ago, paleontologists unearthed two partial skeletons of a mysterious dinosaur species in New Mexico. This creature, which lived about 92 million years ago, bore some resemblance to giant tyrannosaurs that reigned from about 80 million to 66 million years ago. One was even found with what could have been a partly digested lizard skull. But the dino was so tiny — only about a meter tall at the hip — it left scientists to wonder where it fit in.

“There was enough of a skeleton to be super intriguing, but not enough to nail it down,” says Sterling Nesbitt, a paleontologist at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg who dug up one of the fossils.

At the time, paleontologists didn’t have many other carnivores in the dinosaur’s size range to provide a point of comparison, Nesbitt says. Now, remnants of tyrannosaurs from Asia and North America have fleshed out the Tyrannosaurus rex’s family tree and allowed researchers to pin the new dinosaur as one of its kin.

Analyses of the newly identified dinosaur, named Suskityrannus hazelae, reveal that this small tyrannosaur boasted some of the signature skeletal features of its megapredator relatives, researchers report online May 6 in Nature Ecology and Evolution. This discovery helps illuminate how tiny hunters that emerged over 100 million years ago gave rise to such enormous, bone-crunching tyrannosaurs like T. rex (SN: 3/16/19, p. 11).

More:
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/tiny-mystery-dinosaur-new-mexico-officially-t-rex-cousin?tgt=nr

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

1. A question about that showed up in

a Geeks Who Drink quiz last week.