Khankhuuluu mongolensis lived in what is now Mongolia about 86 million years ago. (Photo courtesy of Julius Chotoni)
Scientists have discovered a previously unknown species of dinosaur dubbed the “dragon prince” – a precursor that preceded the rise of the tyrannosaurs to planetary dominance. This newly discovered relative of Tyrannosaurus rex was identified after re-analyzing fossils found in Mongolia.
Its existence provides information about the development of tyrannosaurs and their distribution.
The scientists named the dinosaur the “dragon prince of Mongolia” (Khankhuuluu mongoliensis), and the genus name was created by Latinizing the Mongolian words for “prince” and “dragon.” Their findings were published in the journal Nature on Wednesday (June 11).
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“They [tyrannosauroids] were princes before they were kings,” study co-author Jared Voris, a research fellow at the University of Calgary in Canada, told Live Science.
Tyrannosauroids were large, bipedal predators with large heads with sharp teeth and small arms. They are part of the larger family Tyrannosauroidea and have been thought to have evolved from smaller species – but until now there has been little fossil evidence to support this idea.
So Voris headed to Mongolia to study partial tyrannosauroid skeletons that had been excavated decades earlier but had not yet been analyzed in detail.
“Many paleontologists knew that these Mongolian fossils were sitting in museum collections, awaiting careful study, and could tell an important part of the story of tyrannosaurs,” Steve Brusatte, a paleontologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom who was not involved in the study, told Live Science.
The specimens that particularly caught Voris's attention were found in Mongolia in 1972 and 1973 and described in a 1977 scientific paper, where they were classified as part of the already known genus Alectrosaurus.
But after re-examining it, “I realized this was something completely different than anything we’d ever seen,” Voris said. “And it was actually the ancestor of all the large, predatory tyrannosaurs that are found here in Alberta, as well as in Mongolia and China.”
Sourse: www.livescience.com
