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Arriving as another prime example of evolution in action, scientists have discovered a smaller, more compact version of the Tyrannosaurus rex (T. rex) that lived around 125 million years ago and predates the mighty predator by some 40 million years.
The T. rex... but smaller, faster, and older. Image: Image Todd Marshall/National Geographic.
According to a report published in the journal Science, the newly unveiled Raptorex kriegsteini had the same nipping jaws and teeth, powerful legs, shortened arms and enlarged head found on the T. rex, but all packed into a much smaller three-metre frame.
Also, weighing just 70kg compared to the T. rex’s hulking body mass of six tonnes, the Raptorex is described as being an extremely agile and mobile hunter, capable of chasing down prey, clutching onto them with its twin-clawed hands, and performing quick kills with its deadly jaws.
The discovery of Raprorex goes against previous scientific theories regarding the T. rex, which claimed the beast’s stumpy arms came about due to an evolutionary inability to scale them up at the same speed as the rest of its powerful limbs.
Study leader and National Geographic Society explorer-in-residence Paul Sereno of the University of Chicago offered that the find is “pretty evolutionarily staggering” insofar as it shows Raptorex to be T. rex but “scaled up, almost without a change, a hundred times.”
The Raptorex kriegsteini discovery has come about following the secret unearthing of an almost complete skeleton in Northern China, which was smuggled into the United States before being sold to private collector Henry Kriegstein at an auction.
Kriegstein later donated the fossilised remains back to the scientific community after being approached by Sereno.
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