Baby T. rex bones found stashed in museum drawer: Vanishingly rare

It’s a tyke-rannosaur.The T-rex might have grown into the biggest, most terrifying creature to ever roam the planet, but it started life no bigger than a house cat.British researchers claim they’ve identified the first-known fossils of baby tyrannosaurs, offering a rare glimpse at the earliest days of the giant reptile’s life, according to a groundbreaking new study in the journal Biology.“Going through museum collections, my colleagues and I have discovered the first remains of hatchling tyrannosaurs,” declared Nick Longrich, a paleontologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Bath in the UK.Longrich and his team found the “vanishingly rare” remains while looking for smaller fossils, which they thought were getting short shrift compared to the fossils of prehistoric megafauna, per Science Alert.

But during their hunt for the small stuff, the scientists ended up finding the bones of one of the largest predators to ever walk the Earth.The team initially mistook one of the samples for the foot bone of an adult theropod dinosaur.However, they later determined that it belonged to a baby rex based on its porousness, which was caused by the dense network of blood vessels nourishing the bone as it grows.“This is typical of an immature dinosaur,” said Longrich, who confirmed it was a T.

Rex foot bone by comparing it to other fossils from the epoch.At first, researchers thought the fossil was a “tiny” adult specimen — the bones were almost a dead ringer for the grownups — but realized it was a dinosaur junior after closely examining other bone and foot fossils.Ultimately, they realized that the tyrannosaur tykes were fairly runty, measuring just 30 inches long and weighing around 5.5 pounds.That’s the average size of a Yorkshire terrier.They were likely only around 4 pounds when newly hatched — a lot smaller than prior projections that claimed they measured three-feet across from nose to tail.This was also a far cry from “Jur...