The first remains of a tyrannosaurus that stalked the southern continents have been identified by scientists from a distinctive hipbone blasted from a cliff face in Australia.
About a quarter of the size of the legendary, and exclusively northern, Tyrannosaurus rex, the dinosaur was about 3m long and would have weighed 80kg, about the same as a human. The find lays to rest the belief that tyrannosaurs never made it to the southern hemisphere. Their fossils have previously been found only in the northern hemisphere.
Tyrannosaurs have very distinctive hip bones, which allowed Roger Benson, a dinosaur expert at the University of Cambridge, to make the identification. In the journal Science, Benson and his colleagues say the dinosaur would have lived about 110 million years ago.
A surge of finds from that period in recent years have shown that these smaller tyrannosaurs were probably widespread, and ancestors of the T rex, which weighed about 4 tonnes and emerged 70 million years ago.
“Although we have only one bone, it shows that 110 million years ago, small tyrannosaurs like ours might have been found worldwide,” Benson said. “This find has major significance for our knowledge of how this group of dinosaurs evolved.”
It was unlikely that a T rex fossil could be uncovered in the southern hemisphere.
“This find shows that tyrannosauroids were able to reach these areas early in their evolutionary history, and also hints at the possibility that others remain to be discovered in Africa, South America and India,” said Paul Barrett, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London and a member of the research team.
Benson said a key question now was why the early tyrannosaurs seem to have evolved into the giant T rex only in the north.
“What we need to know now is just how diverse the early radiation of tyrannosaurs was, why they went extinct, leaving only giant-sized, short-armed species like T rex, and how successful they might have been in the southern hemisphere,” Benson said.
The distinctive hip bone was one of 100-odd bones and fragments recovered at Dinosaur Cove in Victoria by Australian scientist Tom Rich in 1989.
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