The King of Gore Tyranosaurus’s family tree just got older by 10 million years thanks to a

The King of Gore Tyranosaurus’s family tree just got older by 10 million years thanks to a newly found ancestor. Lythronax argestes was discovered in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah, and is around 80 million years old. Eight metres long and weighing in at 2.5 tons it was a powerful predator of the late Cretaceous shores of a swampy sub tropical island (named Laramidia) off the inland sea that ran through the middle of the continental USA between 95 and 70 million years back. Like T-rex, it had eye orbits sited to give it binocular vision, a massive rounded snout (unlike many T-rex thin snouted cousins) and does not display primitive anatomy, implying that further ancestors of this long dead sprig on life’s great bush remain to be discovered. Dinosaurs of this era were diversifying rapidly because the inland sea and many islands of Laramidia separated populations, rather like the Galapagos finches that helped stimulate Darwin’s initial thoughts on evolution. The paper also suggests that previous hypotheses on regular genetic exchange between American and Asian Tyranosaurids may never have happened and that three separate radiations from a common ancestor may have resulted in the multiplicity of this dinosaur branch. The name Lythronax comes from the Greek words for gore and king. Loz Image credit: Andrey Atuchinhttp://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/nov/06/lythronax-argestes-tyrannosaurshttp://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/nov/06/king-gore-tyrannosaurus-rex-lythronax-argestes-dinosaur Original paper, free access: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0079420 -- source link

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