Hard evidence that Giant Tyrannosaurs were Cuter than you ever thought possible
Annalee Newitz
2012-04-05 00:00:00
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Three nearly complete, well-preserved fossils give us a glimpse of tyrannosaurs the way we've never seen them before. The fossils were found in the Liaoning Province in China, in the "Yixian formation," a package of rocks that is known to date to the early Cretaceous period. Described today in Nature magazine, the creatures are in the subgroup Tyrannosauroidea, which is part of the Therapod family that includes both the iconic T. Rex as well as winged dinosaurs who eventually evolved into today's birds. The animals that paleontologist Xing Xu and colleagues dubbed Yutyrannus huali would have been quite large for tyrannosaurs (the largest, an adult, likely weighed almost 1.5 tons) and were probably the apex predators of their region.






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