By Colin Barras.
There is a skeleton at the Field Museum.
Alamy and EQRoy.
The tyrant lizard king might have belonged to a dynasty. A research team wants to split the famous species into three, with T. rex taking the place of the imperator and regina. The proposal is unpopular with other palaeontologists.
T. rex was an apex predator that lived in North America over 66 million years ago. The first fossils of T. rex were found more than a century ago, but for a long time few skeletons were known. Scott Persons at the College of Charleston says that it is now possible to assess whether or not the animals fall into a single species because more have come to light since the 1990s.
Persons and Van Raalte worked with Gregory Paul to explore the question. The number of front teeth in the lower jaw and the stoutness of the thigh bones were looked at by the trio.
Join us for a mind-blowing festival of ideas and experiences. New Scientist Live is going hybrid, with a live in-person event in Manchester, UK, that you can also enjoy from the comfort of your own home, from 12 to 14 March 2022. Find out more.They think it's justified to split the dinosaurs into three different species because of the variation in both features. The oldest animals, which had four small incisors at the front of the lower jaw, are placed in the new species T. imperator.
Two small incisors at the front of the lower jaw are what the trio believe this evolved into. One of the younger species had slender thigh bones and was named T. regina. The second species had stout thighs. T. rex is the name of this species.
There will be people who will say that naming a new dinosaur is fun and cool. It is very likely that the apex predator, like the lions and leopards, evolved into distinct species.
The conclusions have implications for some of the most famous tyrannosaurus fossils.
Philip Currie at the University of Alberta, Canada, expects the proposal to spark debate.
Stephen Brusatte at the University of Edinburgh, UK says that he understands the temptation to divide T. rex into different species. These are all still T. rex to me.
The evidence in the new paper is weak according to Thomas Carr. He published an in-depth analysis of T. rex in 2020. He says he found nothing that made him think there was more than one species.
Carr is troubled that the three researchers included data from fossils housed at the Black Hills Institute, a private corporation in South Dakota.
Carr believes that fossils in public collections will always be available for scientific study. Fossils in private collections can be sold to someone who won't allow scientific access. Stan lived at the BHI before the 2020 auction.
Paul says that it is a significant problem and that it is not possible to assess the taxonomy of the tyrannosaurus rex.
The results of the new analysis might help reduce the likelihood of fossils being sold in the future. If a T. rex in a private institution is renamed, it may not be as popular with potential buyers.
Evolutionary Biology is a journal.
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