An artist's reconstruction of Timurlengia euoticaAMNH, ORIGINAL PAINTING BY TODD MARSHALLThe ancient forebears of Tyrannosaurus rex were much smaller than the fearsome dinosaur, and they likely employed some of the sensory innovations used by the notorious carnivore before evolution set them on a path towards colossal size, according to a study published in PNAS this week (March 14).
Researchers had found a couple dozen fossilized bone fragments of a dinosaur now named Timurlengia euotica in Uzbekistan from 1997 to 2006. This latest analysis of the 90 million-year-old remains, including a focused look at the animal’s braincase, suggests that the species may have shared T. rex’s acute hearing without being nearly as large as the hulking carnivore. T. euotica serves as a missing link of sorts in tyrannosaur evolution, as no T. rex ancestors had previously been described from a window of time from about 100 million to 80 million years ago.
“This is what we’d been waiting for,” study coauthor Stephen Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh, U.K., told Nature. T. rex ancestors that roamed the Earth more than 100 million ...
