>>Dug up in the US state of Utah, the new species has been named Moros intrepidus. For now it’s known from a few leg bones and some teeth, but the discoverers have worked out that the creature would have grown to just 1.2 m (3.9 ft) tall at the hip and weighed a petite 78 kg (172 lb). That makes it an absolute featherweight compared to its great-great grandkids like T-Rex, which routinely stood 3.6 m (12 ft) tall and topped out at 8 tons.

This tiny tyrannosaur also helps patch up some holes in the dinosaur family tree. It’s currently thought that the biggest species of tyrannosaurs, like T-Rex or Albertosaurus, only really lived for the last 2 million years before the asteroid rebooted life on Earth 66 million years ago. Older fossils, particularly from Asia, show that about 100 million years prior to that, tyrannosaurs were much smaller.<<

https://newatlas.com/tiny-tyrannosaur-fossil/58549/

Time to dig out my cartoon on T-Rex ancestors?

Dilong is the most famous one, but by no means the only one known.

T-Rex and birds are quite closely related, and it doesn’t look as if bird ancestors were ever much bigger than an ostrich.

mollwollfumble said:

Time to dig out my cartoon on T-Rex ancestors?

Dilong is the most famous one, but by no means the only one known.

T-Rex and birds are quite closely related, and it doesn’t look as if bird ancestors were ever much bigger than an ostrich.

I googled giantocornis and got https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornish_chicken

PermeateFree said:

>>Dug up in the US state of Utah, the new species has been named Moros intrepidus. For now it’s known from a few leg bones and some teeth, but the discoverers have worked out that the creature would have grown to just 1.2 m (3.9 ft) tall at the hip and weighed a petite 78 kg (172 lb). That makes it an absolute featherweight compared to its great-great grandkids like T-Rex, which routinely stood 3.6 m (12 ft) tall and topped out at 8 tons.

This tiny tyrannosaur also helps patch up some holes in the dinosaur family tree. It’s currently thought that the biggest species of tyrannosaurs, like T-Rex or Albertosaurus, only really lived for the last 2 million years before the asteroid rebooted life on Earth 66 million years ago. Older fossils, particularly from Asia, show that about 100 million years prior to that, tyrannosaurs were much smaller.<<

https://newatlas.com/tiny-tyrannosaur-fossil/58549/

“Older fossils, particularly from Asia, show that about 100 million years prior to that, tyrannosaurs were much smaller. But between those two extremes, there’s a 70-million year gap in the North American fossil record. M. intrepidus helps plug it up, with its discoverers dating it to about 15 million years before the next earliest-known, North American tyrannosaur.”

https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-019-0308-7 “Diminutive fleet-footed tyrannosauroid narrows the 70-million-year gap in the North American fossil record.”

“tyrannosauroids generally (Dilong, Guanlong, Alioramus, Dryptosaurus, Gorgosaurus , Bistahieversor , Albertosaurus, Tarbosaurus, and Tyrannosaurus)

Dilong was much smaller than the new Tyrannosaurid, but lived much earlier. Dilong weighed 11 kg. This new one 70 kg.

Here’s the family tree with the new one in place. I’m not sure this is readable. It appears on the chart as Moros.