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On the dinosaur trail

Alok Jha

A peek into one of the most murky parts of dinosaur evolution

An artist's rendering of Guanlong wucaii.

London: It was the daddy of the most fearsome dinosaur known to exist. The fossil of this three-metre-long Guanlong wucaii (which translates as "crowned dragon of the five coloured rocks," was found in the Junggar basin in northwest China and represents the earliest tyrannosaur known to exist.

It lived 160 million years ago, in the late Jurassic period, around 100 million years before Tyrannosaurus rex, one of its direct descendants. The discovery of the creature, announced on Thursday in the journal Nature, gives palaeontologists a peek into one of the most murky parts of dinosaur evolution.

"Tyrannosaurids were the dominant group of predators in eastern and central Asia and North America during the last 20 million years of the late Cretaceous epoch," said Thomas Holtz of the University of Maryland, in an accompanying article in Nature.

A theory confirmed

Guanlong confirms the theory that the tyrannosaurs branched off from the rest of the dinosaur family early on. It shares limb characteristics with later dinosaurs, meaning it was a fierce predator. It also preserves some of the features that were later lost in T rex and other tyrannosaurs.

A good example is the Guanlong's arms, relatively long and ending in three fingers, useful for holding down prey while eating.

This contrasts with the useless, stubby arms ending in two fingers for the much larger T rex.

Delicate crest

Another interesting feature is the huge nasal crest. While the later tyrannosaurs attacked their prey by slamming their skulls into unlucky animals, Dr. Holtz said that Guanlong's delicate crest, probably no thicker than a tortilla, would have prevented that sort of hunting.

"The fragile nature of these structures suggests that they served for visual signalling, and so for species recognition and mating displays, rather than as weapons," he said.

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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