According to American news reports, a team of paleontologists has discovered the first known skeleton of a baby Tyrannosaurus and are preparing it in a Texas laboratory.
The specimen, which may be 75-90 percent complete, was found in 1998 by amateur paleontologist Ron Frithiof north of Belle Fourche, South Dakota. Frithiof says that the fossil is still partially enclosed in rock and is being prepared at a laboratory he owns in San Antonio, Texas.
"It really did knock my socks off," said paleontologist Robert Bakker who has viewed the fossil, "you're getting a window into the childhood of the world's favorite dinosaur.'
According to Tom Holtz of the University of Maryland, the fossil should help scientists study such topics as growth patterns in Tyrannosaurs, and if a skull recently assigned to the new species Nanotyrannus by Bakker is actually a juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex.
Holtz himself has not been able to arrange a vist to see the fossil yet, but is lobbying to because the finding would "indeed be a big deal."
According to Bakker, the specimen dubbed "Tinker" after Frithiof's childhood nickname, is about 66 million years old and probably weighed about "a quarter as much as dad." In other words, he explained, Tinker would have weighed somewhere in the ballpark of 1,200 to 1,500 pounds and probably was about 23 feet long. It is clearly a juvenile because of a series of unfused backbones, Bakker pointed out.
The fossil also shows that the juvenile T. rex was "quite gangly, particularly long in the shin and ankle. That's a pleasant confirmation' of prior work," Bakker said. But, the jaws are "100 percent adult, armed with massive bone-crushing teeth.'' This suggests to Bakker and his colleagues that the juvenile T. rex ate an adult diet, even though it surely wasn't strong enough to hunt prey on its own. This implies that the rex parents may have hunted food and brought it back to their nests. In a public post to the Dinosaur Mailing List, Holtz offered another alternative, saying that possibly the rex juveniles MAY have hunted smaller animals or could have even hunted in packs. The answer, as intriguing as it may be, will probably go unsolved.
For more information on the find, check out these sources:
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