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New dinosaur species discovered that "rewrote" the T.rex family tree

2025-06-12 09:17:00, Kuriozitete CNA

Scientists have discovered a new species of dinosaur - in the collection of a Mongolian museum - that they say "rewrites" the evolutionary history of tyrannosaurs.

The researchers concluded that two 86-million-year-old skeletons they studied belonged to a species that is now the closest known ancestor of all tyrannosaurs, the group of predators that includes the iconic T. rex.

The researchers named the species Khankhuuluu (pronounced khan-KOO-loo) mongoliensis, which means Dragon Prince of Mongolia.

The discovery, published in the journal Nature, is a window into how tyrannosaurs evolved to become powerful predators that terrorized North America and Asia until the end of the dinosaurs' reign.

"'Prince' refers to this species as an early, smaller tyrannosauroid," explained Prof. Darla Zelenitsky, a paleontologist from the University of Calgary in Canada. Tyrannosauroids were a superfamily of carnivorous dinosaurs that walked on two legs.

However, the first tyrannosauroids were small.

PhD student Jared Voris, who led the research with Prof Zelenitsky, explained: "They were these really small, fast-footed predators that lived in the shadow of other top-tier predatory dinosaurs."

Khankhuuluu represents an evolutionary shift - from those small hunters that roamed around during the Jurassic period - to fearsome giants, including the T-rex.

Khankhuuluu would have weighed around 750kg, while a full-grown T.rex could have weighed up to eight times that, so "this is a transitional [fossil]", explained Prof Zelenitsky, "between earlier ancestors and the mighty tyrannosaurs".

"It has helped us to revisit the tyrannosaur family tree and rewrite what we know about tyrannosaur evolution," she added.

The two partial skeletons the team examined in this study were first discovered in Mongolia in the early 1970s. They were initially assigned to an existing species, known as Alectrosaurus, but when Voris examined them, he identified tyrannosaur-like features that set it apart./ CNA