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Chicago Scientist Identifies Tiny T-Rex
Produced by Gabriel Spitzer on Thursday, September 17, 2009

The newly discovered Raptorex, an early and tiny ancestor of the T-Rex. (courtesy of Science magazoine, drawing by Todd Marshall)

Scientists have discovered a miniature ancestor of the prehistoric world’s most infamous predator. The finding overturns much of what science thought it knew about the origins of Tyrannosaurus Rex.

“Cute” is not a word most people would use to describe a T-Rex. But shrink down a Tyrannosaurus to about one-ninetieth its size, and you get the adorable newly discovered species, Raptorex. It has the same look: giant head, powerful legs, puny little arms. University of Chicago paleontologist Paul Sereno describes the body design as “jaws-on-legs.”

SERENO: We see this all, to our great surprise, in an animal that is basically the body weight of a human.

Sereno is lead author of an article on the discovery out today in the journal, Science. Scientists had thought characteristics like the tiny arms evolved as a result of T-Rex being so gigantic. Now it looks like they had scrawny arms before they got the big body – as part of an efficient shape that was simply scaled up over millions of years.