General, Research, Technology

Tyrannosaurs appeared much earlier than we used to think

American paleontologists were discoveredthe remains of a dinosaur, which was a close relative of the tyrannosaurus. Thanks to this, it turned out that tyrannosaurs appeared much earlier than we used to think.

Tyrannosaurus - one of the most famous and studied.species of carnivorous dinosaurs. The name "tyrannosaurus" comes from two Greek words - a tyrant and a lizard. It was the most gigantic tyrannosaurid dinosaur ever found and one of the largest terrestrial carnivores in the history of our planet.

In total, more than30 skeletons of tyrannosaurs, some of them are preserved almost completely. In at least one of the samples, the presence of soft tissues and proteins was recorded.

The remains of a new species of carnivorous dinosaurlay in the sediments of the mid-Cretaceous period in Utah, in the mountains near the city of Escalante, about 80 million years, which pushes back the time of the appearance of the “Mesozoic kings” by 10 million years in the past, according to an article published in the journal PlosOne. A new species of the genus of dinosaurs was called Lythronax argestes ("blood king").

"Lythronax and other tyrannosaurids discovered by ussurvived the evolutionary boom 95-80 million years ago when the inland sea in North America was as large as possible. The invasion of sea waters led to the emergence of many relatively isolated land areas, which allowed dinosaurs to follow different evolutionary paths, ”said Randall Irmis from the National Utah History Museum in Salt Lake City (USA).

In the south of Utah, the Great Staircase rises -a huge array of rocks that formed on the bottom of the shallow sea in the middle of America in the middle of the Cretaceous period of the Mesozoic era and contain many fossilized remains of large and small animals.

Here paleontologists discovered a skull and someother parts of the skeleton of a large predatory dinosaur, whose length could reach eight meters and a mass of 2.5 tons. Judging by the anatomy of this dinosaur, it belonged to the tyrannosaurus family and was their oldest representative.

Moreover, despite his venerable age, hisThe "wide" skull box was almost identical in structure to the head of the "King of the Mesozoic" of the tyrannosaurus Rex (Tyrannosaurus rex), who lived almost 15 million years later.

According to scientists, the discovery of the "blood king"allows us to say that tyrannosaurs first appeared in Laramidia, the western “half” of North America that existed in the middle and end of the Cretaceous.

Based on materials from RIA Novosti