New 3-foot-tall relative of Tyrannosaurus rex

[Still Waters]

A new relative of the Tyrannosaurus rex—much smaller than the huge, ferocious dinonsaur made famous in countless books and films, including, yes, "Jurassic Park—has been discovered and named by a Virginia Tech paleontologist and an international team of scientists.

The newly named tyrannosauroid dinosaur—Suskityrannus hazelae—stood rougly 3 feet (0.9 m) tall at the hip and was about 9 feet (2.7 m) in length, the entire animal only marginally longer than the just the skull of a fully grown Tyrannosaurus rex, according to Sterling Nesbitt, an assistant professor with Department of Geosciences in the Virginia Tech College of Science. In a wild twist to this discovery, Nesbitt found the fossil at age 16 whilst a high school student participating in a dig expedition in New Mexico in 1998, led by Doug Wolfe, an author on the paper.

https://phys.org/news/2019-05-three-foot-tall-relative-tyrannosaurus-rex.html