The relics of an unknown kind of dinosaur, his relative T-Rexfound in Mongoliaforgotten in an institute of the country’s capital, Ulan Bator.
Light in a complex family story of perhaps the most famous dinosaur, of REX TYrannosauru (T-Rex)they come to throw the fossils of a distant relative who had been “forgotten” for half a century on the drawers of an institute in the Mongolia.
This T-Rex ancestor was much smaller in size as it looked like ‘Very big horse’said the Darla Zelenitskypaleontologist at the University of Calgari, Canada, and one of the authors of the study published today in the scientific journal Nature. It was about four meters long and weighed 750 kg.
The fossils were found in southeastern Mongolia in the early 1970s. But at that time they were accidentally attributed to the Electrosaurusanother member of the tyrannical family.
For half a century, they stayed hidden in the archives of the Institute of Paleontology of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences in Ulan Batoruntil a doctoral student, Jared Voris, visiting the country, realized that something was not going well with the “identification” of the bones, Zlenitsky said.
«It is likely that other such findings are found in other museums and not have been properly recognized“, He appreciated.
In honor of “king” T-rex, the new species was baptized Glue Mongolivesisthat is, “Prince Dragon of Mongolia”.
Who was T-Rex
The discovery “allowed us to clarify many elements of the family history of tyrannicals”, whose T-Rex is the last spokesman, Zlenitsky explained.
T-Rex was the dominant predator of North America until 66 million years ago, when an asteroid larger than Mount Everest fell into the Gulf of Mexico.
75% of life on Earth disappeared – among these species were all dinosaurs, except for those who evolved into today’s birds.
About 20 million years before that, the Glue Mongolivesis – Or a close relative – migrated from Asia to North America, passing through the land passage that then linked Siberia to Alaska. This is how the tyrants evolved on the American continent.
Paleontologists believe that one of these North American species later returned to Asia, where two subspecies appeared: one weighed less than one tone and had a very long snout – hence the name “Pinocchio Rex” given to him. The other was gigantic, like the Tarbossaurus, a little smaller than the T-Rex.
One of these great dinosaurs went back after the way back to North America, where evolved to T-Rex, the kind that dominated for two million years.