A random find at the Institute for Paleontology of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences is due to the fact that the family history of Tyrannosaurus Rex must now be rewritten. Because a new dinosaur type is an ancestor of the famous giant.
The bones were first dug out in the early 1970s in southeastern Mongolia. At that time, however, they were identified as from another Tyrannosaurs, the Alectrosaurus. For half a century, the fossils stored in the drawers of the Institute of Paleontology of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences in the capital Ulan Bator.
Doctorate student suspected: “There is something wrong”
There they would probably still serve as a dust catcher if the PhD student Jared Voris would not have encountered the drawers during a trip to the Central Asian country. When he started browsing her, he discovered that something was wrong, Darla Zelenitsky explains from the University of Calgary, who published the new knowledge together with various colleagues in the magazine “Nature”.
It turned out that the bones were good – -controlled partial skeletons of two different individuals of a completely new way. Zelenitsky says that the discovery “helped us to clarify much about the pedigree of the Tyrannosaurs group” at the end of which the T-Rex is. This “family history” had previously been “very confusing”.
“Dragon Prince of Mongolia”
But who is this “new” ancestor? The much more grassy copy was only about four meters long and weighed only three -quarters. “He would have been the size of a very large horse,” says Zelenitsky. Because of his relatively small form compared to the “King” Tyrannosaurus Rex, the researchers of the new species gave the name Khankhuuluu Mongoliensis – which means “Dragon Prince of Mongolia”.
According to the researchers, the “Dragon Prince” probably walked from Asia to North America and used the Country Bridge, which once connected Siberia and Alaska. As a result, the Tyrannosaurs in North America spread.
Source: Krone
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