Paleontologists recently discovered fossils of the "great uncle" of the Tyrannosaurus Rex in southern Utah, National Geographic reported. The predatory beast, named Lythronax or "King of Gore," existed about 12 million years before the Tyrannosaurus (which lived around 70 million years ago), but was just as big and just as fierce.
National Geographic reporter Brian Switek calls the Lythronax the great uncle of the T-Rex because the two weren't direct ancestors. Rather, the meat eaters and largest land animals of their respective time periods most likely evolved from a separate, common ancestor. For paleontologists, this assumption is enormously exciting, because it means there are even older tyrannosaur fossils still waiting to be found.
According to one expert at the Lythronax's press conference, paleontologists have explored only 10 percent of the fossil-rich areas that make up Utah's Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, where the new species was found.
Just like the recent discovery of a giant (three-foot long) platypus, the discovery of Lythrnax "revised the [evolutionary] tree. We completely changed the way we thought about tyrannosaur relatives," study co-author Joseph Sertich told The Salt Lake Tribune. "It's shaken people up in the dinosaur world."
Still, tyrannosaur finds are some of the rarest because few existed even when the species was alive, according to National Geographic.
Despite being separated by 12 million years and many miles of land (the Tyrannosaurus lived much farther north), the Lythronax and the Tyrannosaurus were physically very similar, National Geographic reported. Both their skulls widened at the back, which provided them with more powerful jaws than later tyrannosaurs that also lived in the north, according to National Geographic.
"That is a skull that's designed for grabbing something, shaking it to death and tearing it apart," said Mark Loewen, a research associate at the Natural History Museum and lead author of the report on the Lythronax.
By way of their unique eye placement, the Lythronax and the Tyrannosaurus were also one the few dinosaurs with eyes that stared mostly straight ahead. Their "binocular vision" gave them the rare ability to stare prey and other dinosaurs down, National Geographic reported.
Though similar, the characteristics of the Lythronax are more consistent with tyrannosaurs appearing after the Tyranosaurus, according to National Geographic. To paleontologists, that's further proof of Tyrannosaur fossils belong to new species still in the ground.
At the very least, there should be more evidence of the Lythronax. Scientists were only able to find parts of the skull and not the complete skeleton, National Geographic reported.
