6/5/2019 When Tyrannosaurs Were Tiny | Smart News | Smithsonian

MAY 7, 2019 Follow @brigitkatz

When Tyrannosaurs Were Tiny

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Smart News
In 1998, when Virginia Tech assistant professor Sterling Nesbitt was 16
years old, he travelled to the Zuni Basin of New Mexico to take part in a
dig led by paleontologist Doug Wolfe. As luck would have it, Nesbitt hit
upon the fossil of a small dinosaur—though experts weren’t able to
identify the species that had left the remains behind. But now, in light
of additional discoveries that have been made over the years, Nesbitt
and his colleagues have been able to identify the 92-million-year-old
fossil as an early and rather tiny Tyrannosaurus rex relative.

Writing in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, the researchers note
that the “multi-tonne, bone-crunching” T. rex that has become a
thundering icon of popular culture thrived in the Late Cretaceous,
between 66 million and 80 million years ago. Discoveries of distant T.
rex relatives have recently revealed that the tyrannosaur family long
consisted of small carnivores—like Dilong paradoxus, which was rst
found in China in 2004. But in the 1990s, when Nesbitt unearthed his

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6/5/2019 When Tyrannosaurs Were Tiny | Smart News | Smithsonian

fossil, the T. rex’s less imposing origins were not widely known or
recognized.

Even today, the evolutionary history of the T. rex is not well

understood, largely because extreme sea level rises during the Late
Cretaceous destroyed fossils that had formed during the previous era,
as Discover’s Eric Betz explains. The newly described fossil is lling in
some of those gaps.

Researchers’ description of the dinosaur is based on two juvenile

specimens: the one uncovered by Nesbitt in 1998, and a partial skull
found in 1997. Dubbed Suskityrannus hazelae—in part after “Suski,”
the Zuni Native American tribe word for “coyote”—the dinosaur stood
around three-feet tall at the hip and spanned around nine feet in
length. Suskityrannus probably weighed between 45 and 95 pounds. It
was not as small as the oldest tyrannosaurs, but it was considerably
smaller than the T. rex, which could reach a weight of nine tons and
boasted a skull that was about the same length as Suskityrannus’ entire
body.

The new dinosaur seems to represent an intermediate phase in

tyrannosaur evolution, according to the study authors. Suskityrannus
has some features seen in its later relatives—like an
“arctometatarsalian foot,” which means that “the three long bones
that make up the sole of the foot are pinched together, with the middle
bone being particularly skinny,” Brown University PhD candidate
Armita Manafzadeh, who was not involved in the new research, tells
Gizmodo’s George Dvorsky. The arctometatarsalian foot has been
linked to improved running ability, and Suskityrannus is the earliest
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known tyrannosaur to possess it.
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Speaking to Dvorsky, Nesbitt notes that Suskityrannus is not a direct

ancestor of the T. rex; it represents more of a “side-branch.” Still, he
says, the dinosaur “gives us a glimpse into the evolution of
tyrannosaurs just before they take over the planet.”

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