Scientists discover T-Rex ancestor

The Moros intrepidus dinosaur, considered an ancestor to legendary T-Rex, turned out to be the size of a large dog. These are the conclusions made by the paleontologists responsible for making this discovery in Utah.

When it comes to the Tyrannosaurus rex, we don’t know as much as we’d like to. This problem is mostly caused by the age of the reptile fossils we have discovered so far: scientists only have access to specimens from 80 or 150 million years ago. That means there’s a 70 million year gap we know nothing about. This enormous chunk of history remains shrouded in mystery.

A recent excavation made by scientists in Utah might help us get to the bottom of this mystery. They discovered the remains of reptiles that had inhabited our planet approximately 100 million years ago, right in the middle of the ‘gap’. Scientists believe that Moros intrepidus (the name given to this dinosaur) was an ancestor of the T-Rex. The arrived at this conclusion after studying the animal’s bone structure, which was almost identical to that of the legendary T-Rex.

Moros intrepidus is much smaller than the T-Rex we know: these reptiles reached only 1 meter in height in adulthood, while their adult descendants were 4 meters tall. This might suggest that unlike the solitary T-Rex, its ancestors lived in packs, joining forces to fight back against larger predators.