The finding that may help solve one of the great mysteries about the T-Rex – BBC World

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Image caption the Timurlengia would be the key to understanding why tyrannosaurs became so dominant.

Fossils recently discovered seem to have the key to one of the major mysteries surrounding the dinosaur T-Rex.

a newly discovered-the tyrannosaur group of carnivorous dinosaurs belonging to the famous predator could hold the key to how these creatures grew and came to dominate Earth.

the fossilized remains of the animal species , named Timurlengia , were found in Uzbekistan by scientists at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, with Russian and American experts.

from the analysis of the remains of Timurlengia, which has an age of 90 million years, show that ears and brain were crucial in the domain that reached those tyrannosaurs .

the finding suggests that first made smarter, before becoming larger.

“This is a totally new dinosaur species,” he said the study’s principal investigator, Stephen Brusatte of the University of Edinburgh.

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Image caption the head of the Department of Paleobiology at the Smithsonian museum holds a tooth Timurlengia right and one of the T-Rex on the left.

“ it is one of the close cousins ​​of the T-Rex, but much smaller , about the size of a horse,” said the expert .

“And it comes from the middle of the Cretaceous period, in which there is a huge gap in the fossil record.”

This “frustrating” gap for scientists -in that tyrannosaurs went from small to giant predators hunters, getting to measure 13 meters from head to col- had made the T-Rex is an evolutionary mystery .

that’s what this finding has helped solve.

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Image caption the graph shows the characteristics of the new dinosaur.

“(The Timurlengia) has features in the bones that are also found in the T-Rex ” said Dr. Brusatte.

“So their evolutionary characteristics are those that will eventually allow the T-Rex become this super-dominant animals located at the top of the food chain”.

the team studied about 25 sections skeleton Timurlengia , joining them to determine its size and shape.

the most revealing was a part of the skull of the animal , the team scanned to calculate the shape of your brain and the inner ear, in an attempt to create an image of their sensory abilities.

“your brain and ear according to what we can tell from a computadorizada- tomography were almost identical to the T-Rex “ said Brusatte.

” So had all the central processing unit there, all intelligence, all keen senses T-Rex and maybe that’s what allowed the T-Rex was so big. “

scientists believe that only when these ancestral tyrannosaurs developed their ingenious brains and keen senses, they grew to the size T-Rex.