CALGARY -- Research led by scientists at the University of Calgary’s department of geoscience revealed new information about the teen years of some of Alberta’s largest predators.
The study, which appears in the Nov. 28 issue of Scientific Reports, looks at juvenile tyrannosaurs, or tyrannosaurids — a group of related meat-eating dinosaur species whose largest and most famous member was the Tyrannosaurus rex, or T. rex.
Alberta’s badland preserves hold some of the greatest variety of tyrannosaurid fossils in the world and include species such as Albertosaurus, Daspletosaurus and Gorgosaurus, which collectively lived during the Late Cretaceous period between 76 and 66 million years ago.
Jared Voris, PhD student and the author of the study, said fossil specimens of juveniles have historically been extremely rare, leading scientists to believe there was very little difference between each species until they became adults.
Voris is hoping to correct this impression with his report for which he examined many young tyrannosaurids fossils in the collections of the Royal Tyrrell Museum, some of which had yet to be studied in detail.
Voris found that juvenile tyrannosaurids were actually far more different from each other than had been previously suspected.
In fact, a specimen long thought to be the only known juvenile Daspletosaurus, a close cousin of T. rex, was found by Voris to actually belong to the Gorgosaurus species, which is a distant cousin.
Jared Voris, pictured with Dr. Darla Zelenitsky, said he's excited to see what more can be learned from juvenile fossils.
"While Gorgosaurus is known from several specimens representing different growth stages of its life cycle from juveniles to fully grown adults, the new identification of the skeleton means Daspletosaurus is pretty much known only from adult individuals," he said.
The new research into juvenile tyrannosaurs gives scientists a clearer picture of a group of important apex predators that lived during that time. Voris said he’s excited to see what more they can learn from these fossils,
"There’s a lot we can do with this information now, I plan on now looking at what it is that differentiates the way that these animals grew," he said.
The study was written with the support of Dr. Darla Zelenitsky, with University of Calgary’s dept. of geoscience, Dr. Francois Therrien, curator of the Royal Tyrrell Museum and Dr. Phillip J. Currie with the University of Alberta.
