However, one important question hasn’t yet been answered-who was T. We know nearly everything about it, from its anatomy to its behavior. Tyrannosaurus rex surely is one of the most well-known dinosaurs of all time. “Ultimately resolving that is going to rely on the most basic first-level aspect of palaeontology, which is boots-on-the-ground and picks in the sediments,' said Holtz.“We need more sampling sites from this interval between about 95 and 80 million years ago.What dinosaur was the ancestor of the mighty Tyrannosaurus rex? Which dinosaur gave rise to this famous lineage? More research was needed to understand what happened. It is quite likely juvenile tyrannosaurs took over the ecological role of the missing middle-sized carnivores.”Īn alternative explanation may also be possible: something else eliminated the other carnivores and T. “In those communities where middle-sized predators are gone but the prey species are just as diverse, can we say that no-one is preying upon these middle-sized prey?' Holtz said.“No. rex evolved and grew to dominance, their juveniles outcompeted other carnivorous dinosaurs in the middle-size range. As a result, the researchers say it is possible that as T.

They believe young tyrannosaurs, who were faster and more agile than their parents, likely hunted prey in a similar way to medium-sized dinosaurs. Specifically, they were looking for two types of changes: prey species increasing dramatically in the absence of predators, or prey species dropping off leading to a disappearance in medium-sized predators.īut the researchers did not find any evidence of changes in prey species diversity, which suggests “something continued to fill the ecological role of the missing middle-sized predators”. Holtz and his team then looked for shifts in the number of prey species in those communities, to see if the disappearance of these dinosaurs was linked to changes in their prey. rex’s alligator-like jaw helped it to bite through bone rexes outcompeted smaller rivals, new study suggests In those communities, found in central Asia and North America, middle-sized predators, ranging from 50kg to 1,000kg, were rare or absent around 80 to 66 million years ago, the researchers said. rex were the largest and most dominant predator, weighing in at over 1,000kg. Analysis showed that in 29 of these communities, T. The really big carnivores, larger than an elephant, like tyrannosaurs and their kin, become the apex predators, and the middle-sized predators, say leopard to buffalo-sized carnivores, are either missing or very rare.”įor their study, the researchers looked at an existing record of 60 dinosaur communities that roamed the planet around 201 to 66 million years ago.

“Then something happens between 95 and 80 million years ago, where we see a shift. “Earlier in the history of dinosaurs, in most communities you’d have a bunch of different types of carnivores of various size ranges from small fox-sized all the way up to the occasional giants,' said Dr Thomas Holtz, a principal lecturer in the University of Maryland’s department of geology in the US. Previous research has suggested that these predators disappeared about 80 million years ago due to a lack of prey but a new study, published in the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences, suggests young tyrannosaurs may be to blame. rex teens may have driven medium-sized dinosaur species extinctįast and agile, Tyrannosaurus rex juveniles were able to outcompete other medium-sized dinosaurs and drive them to extinction as the species became more dominant, scientists believe.

Trex dinosaur names