First Ever Tyrannosaur Bone Found in Southern Continents

March 26th, 2010

Scientist have believe for decades that the Tyrannosaur had never made it to the southern hemisphere, and that all of the T-Rex dinosaurs were found in the north.

The Tyrannosaur is a relative of the well known predator the T-Rex. Scientists from Cambridge, London and Melbourne have found the first ever evidence that tyrannosaur dinosaurs existed in the southern continents. They identified a hip bone found at Dinosaur Cove in Victoria, Australia as belonging to an ancestor of Tyrannosaurus rex.

As this is the first of its kind to be get found, tagged, and hit with a barcode scanner in the south, scientists begin to wonder why the evolution into the T-Rex and other tyrannosaurus predators only happened in the north.

The 30cm-long pubis bone from Dinosaur Cove looks like a rod with two expanded ends, one of which is flattened and connects to the hip and the other looks like a ‘boot’.

According to Dr Roger Benson of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge, who identified the find: “The bone is unambiguously identifiable as a tyrannosaur because these dinosaurs have very distinctive hip bones.”

“This is an exciting discovery because tyrannosaur fossils had only ever been found in the northern hemisphere before and some scientists thought tyrannosaurs never made it down south.

“Although we only have one bone, it shows that 110 million years ago small tyrannosaurs like ours might have been found worldwide. This find has major significance for our knowledge of how this group of dinosaurs evolved.” says Dr Benson.