The most feared dinosaur from history, Tyrannosaurus Rex, or T-Rex, in short, has a new relative after some recent discoveries. Scientists are behind this family tree of the T-Rex, and they announced a new dinosaur that could be its cousin. We are talking about a dinosaur that has around three-foot height, and a human could look at it in the eyes. The discovery was made by Sterling Nesbitt, a paleontologist at Virginia Tech.
Sterling Nesbitt is the one that had found a set of bones in 1998 at the age of 16 years when he was a volunteer in New Mexico. Unfortunately, for about two decades, scientists haven’t known many details about the bones — the story changes when other small cousins of T-Rex have been discovered.
Scientists unearthed a child-sized T-Rex dinosaur species
Thanks to Nesbitt discovery, we now know much more information about the small Tyrannosaurus dinosaurs and what makes them so unique. The finding shows us a dinosaur called Suskityrannus Hazelae and has lived 92 million years ago. That means that it lived with 20 million years before its cousin T-Rex. Besides the T-Rex, the little cousin was longer than taller. He was with three times longer than taller and weighed between 45 to 90 pounds.
Despite that Suskityrannus Hazelae is not the first one found from the Tyrannosaurus family tree and not even the smallest, Nesbitt’s opinion is that having more discoveries like this one will help scientists to find out how they have evolved. Also, Hans Sues, a paleobiologist from Smithsonian Institute says that indeed this discovery is very significant. In that way, they will have a record of the evolution of the dinosaurs, especially in North America.
Finally, some question remains about these carnivores. If they started from the little guy like Suskityrannus, how they evolved later to be so gigantic? Nesbit believes that the cousin of the T-Rex could have been the last one from its species, with big feet for speed, something that T-Rex doesn’t have.
Doris’s passion for writing started to take shape in college where she was editor-in-chief of the college newspaper. Even though she ended up working in IT for more than 7 years, she’s now back to what he always enjoyed doing. With a true passion for technology, Doris mostly covers tech-related topics.