Life reconstruction of Tyrannosaurus mcraeen. Image credit: Sergey Krasovskiy.
SciNews has news of a new species of Tyrannosaur. This one is called Tyrannosaurs mcraeensis. It was described from fossils found in the Hall Lake Formation of New Mexico. This is most likely a sister species of Tyrannosaurus rex. which existed about 3 to 5 million years before T. rex. The paper "A giant tyrannosaur from the Campanian–Maastrichtian of southern North America and the evolution of tyrannosaurid gigantism" was published in the journal Scientific Reports.
The newly-identified species, Tyrannosaurus mcraeen, lived in what is now the United States between 71 and 73 million years ago, or between 5 and 7 million years before T. rex.
The dinosaur’s fossilized partial skull was found in the Hall Lake Formation of New Mexico.
Although the specimen was initially assigned to T. rex and was comparable in size to those of T. rex, the paleontologists propose that it belongs to a new species due to the presence of multiple subtle differences in the shape of, and joins between, the skull bones of the specimen and T. rex.
