Meet T. Rex's Fierce, Fleet-Footed Relative

Scientists have discovered a nimble, meat-eating dinosaur with blade-like teeth that fills an important gap in Tyrannosaurus rex's family tree. The newly named creature, Timurlengia euotica, sheds light on how a family of dinosaurs called tyrannosaurs advanced from being small predators to clever giants at the top of the food chain -- within the span of about 70 million years. The long-legged, 600-pound T. euotica lived some 90 million years ago. It was around this time that tyrannosaurs developed impressive cognitive abilities and sharp senses, such as the ability to detect low-frequency sounds, according to a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Soon after, tyrannosaurs began to get bigger. By the late Cretaceous period, massive tyrannosaur species would emerge, such as T. rex, which lived around 66 to 68 million years ago, said Dr. Hans-Dieter Sues, the chairman of the paleobiology department at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and a co-author of the study. "Timurlengia has already evolved the sophisticated senses and many bone features of T. rex but was a much smaller animal," Sues said. "The new discovery fills in a multimillion-year gap in the evolution of one particularly successful group of dinosaurs." Sues and Dr. Alexander Averianov, a senior scientist at the Russian Academy of Sciences, unearthed the T. euotica fossils in the Kyzylkum Desert of Uzbekistan du...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news