Jurassic Park fans must be disappointed to learn that the prehistoric creatures depicted in this film series (and other fictional products) probably have little to do with what they actually looked like.
We have more and more data confirming that the distorted vision of a fierce, fearsome creature with large jaws, scaly skin and astonishing size and speed designed for the cinema in the late 1990s… it is most likely wrong.
We are facing a new clue to find out the details of the appearance of the real Tyrannosaurius rex : a new relative, much smaller , has just been described from excavations carried out in New Mexico in 1998.
It has been baptized as Suskityrannus hazelae and apparently lived about ninety-two million years ago from the Cretaceous Period, a time when some of the largest dinosaurs ever found lived. However, he was not so much: he was a little less than a meter in height, and a little over eight feet in length. Of course, its skull was slightly longer than that of the Tyrannosaurius rex; that is why he is considered something of his ‘little cousin’.
Apparently, the little relative of the fearsome T. rex must have weighed between twenty and forty kilograms, while the Tyrannosaurus rex is estimated to have weighed about ninety tons, to give us an idea of the staggering difference in size.
On the other hand, surely what both sauropods agreed the most was in their diet: Suskityrannus hazelae was probably a carnivore , a hunter of small animals, although which ones are unknown.
Let’s continue with the comparisons. You’ve probably come across not a few memes joking about the T. rex’s very short arms. If you’re wondering if Suskityrannus hazelae was also ‘short-billed’ , the scientific team isn’t quite sure about it. No arm fossils were found from any of the specimens, but partial claws from the hands were found, which are quite small.
It is also not known: if the Suskityrannus hazelae had two or three fingers. What we do know is the age at which the specimen corresponding to the fossil found died: it was less than three years old when it died, according to the analysis of its bones.
The amazing story behind the discovery
Sterling Nesbitt, an assistant professor in the Department of Geosciences at Virginia Tech College of Science, found the fossil at the age of sixteen, when he was a high school student participating in an excavation expedition in New Mexico in 1998.
At the excavation, organized by Zuni Paleontology Project leader Doug Wolfe, two partial skeletons were found. The first included part of a skull, found in 1997 by Robert Denton, today a geologist at Terracon Consultants; and the second, our Suskityrannus hazelae , in the Zuni Basin of western New Mexico.
Twenty years have passed since the fossils were discovered, and the scientific team was not aware of what they were dealing with.
Nesbitt first thought they had the remains of a dromaeosaur, such as Velociraptor (in the late 1990s, the close relatives of Tyrannosaurus rex were simply not known, or not recognized). Since then, other distant cousins of the Tyrannosaurus rex, such as Dilong paradoxus , have been found throughout Asia.
Since 2006, Nesbitt has analyzed the fossils through various publications as a student and researcher in New York, Texas, Illinois, and now in Blacksburg. He credits the discovery, and his interactions with team members on the expedition, as the beginning of his career.
The work that definitively describes Suskityrannus hazelae is published in the latest online edition of Nature Ecology & Evolution. Describing the new find, Nesbitt said: ” Suskityrannus hazelae has a much thinner skull and foot than its larger cousins, such as Tyrannosaurus rex. “
The find also links the oldest and smallest tyrannosaurs in North America and China to later and much larger tyrannosaurs.
Why that name?
The name Suskityrannus hazelae is derived from “suski”, the Zuni Native American word for “coyote”; from the Latin word “tyrannus” meaning king and “hazelae” for Hazel Wolfe, whose support made possible many of the successful fossil expeditions in the Zuni Basin.
A mid-Cretaceous tyrannosauroid and the origin of North American end-Cretaceous dinosaur assemblages, Nature Ecology & Evolution (2019). DOI: 10.1038 / s41559-019-0888-0, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-019-0888-0
