The dinosaur world is getting a new addition thanks to a Virginia Tech paleontologist.
That’s the sound of the Tyrannosaurus rex from Jurassic Park. Or, actually, it’s the Hollywood version of what a Tyrannosaurs might have sounded back in the early 1990’s when the movie was a smash hit.
It was only a few years later that a high school student by the name of Sterling Nesbitt made an interesting discovery during an expedition in New Mexico.
“We didn’t actually know we had a tyrannosauroid dinosaur for a long time because there weren’t any dinosaurs at the time to compare to,” says Nesbitt.
It was smaller. Much smaller. Just three feet tall and nine feet long. That discovery led to a lengthy investigation, and Nesbitt — now a Virginia Tech paleontologist — is part of a team publishing the findings in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.
“They weren’t the large dominant predators that we know about until the very end of the Cretaceous," he says. "So this helps us constrain when tyrannosauroid dinosaurs became the dominant predators that we’ve seen all over the world in museums.”
Perhaps the most exciting part of the new discovery is the new name: Suskityrannus hazelae, the younger sibling of the larger and much more ferocious T-rex.
RADIO IQ is a service of Virginia Tech.
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.
