Sydney, March 29 (Inditop.com) A fossil find shows that a tinier version of T-Rex existed in Australia.
An international team found the hip bone at Dinosaur Cove in south-west Victoria. The team was led by Pat Rich, paleontology professor at Monash University (MU), and Tom Rich, honorary researcher in the School of Geosciences.
Researchers believe the bone would have come from an animal about three metres long and weighing around 80 kg, similar to a human, and would have had the large head and small arms that make tyrannosaurs so distinctive.
“The existence of this hip bone shows that about 100 million years ago, in the early Cretaceous period, small tyrannosaurs were found in other parts of the world. This discovery changes our understanding of the evolution of this group of dinosaurs,” Rich said.
The fossil was later identified by Roger Benson of the University of Cambridge with research supported by co-author Paul Barrett from the Natural History Museum, London.
“The bone is unambiguously identifiable as a tyrannosaur because these dinosaurs have very distinctive hip bones,” Benson said.
Measuring around 30 cm in length, the pubis bone, looks like a rod with two expanded ends. One end is flattened and connects to the hip while the other is shaped like a boot, says a MU release.
Compared with T-rex, which lived about 70 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous period, the newly identified dinosaur was about one-third its size and lived earlier during the Cretaceous period, around 110 million years ago.
These findings were published in Science.
