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Description

For the longest of time we thought that early tyranosaurs were small animals at best when they started out, and didn't grow larger than the man sized Eotyrannus lengi (130-124 mya) up until the very end of the Cretaceous (85-65 mya).

However 2 very recent discoveries shock that notion up, with the discovery of the Aptian Sinotyrannus kazuoensis (120 mya) and soon after the slightly older Barremian Yutyrannus huali (125 mya), both from China and both growing up to 9 m long and weighing up to 1.5 to 2 tones, comparable in size to most late Cretaceous tyrannosaurs, and only outsized by the true 12 m giants like Tarbosaurus baatar and of course Tyrannosaurus rex, showing that these guys have been terrorizing the Mesozoic as alpha predators much earlier than we initially though.

As the fossil record indicates, carnosaurs still ruled the roost in most places during the early Cretaceous, like the British Neovenator salerii (8 m) and the American Acrocanthosaurus atokensis (11.5 m), but mainland east Asia seemed to have belonged to the pioneers of giant tyrannosaurs.

Description

For the longest of time we thought that early tyranosaurs were small animals at best when they started out, and didn't grow larger than the man sized Eotyrannus lengi (130-124 mya) up until the very end of the Cretaceous (85-65 mya).

However 2 very recent discoveries shock that notion up, with the discovery of the Aptian Sinotyrannus kazuoensis (120 mya) and soon after the slightly older Barremian Yutyrannus huali (125 mya), both from China and both growing up to 9 m long and weighing up to 1.5 to 2 tones, comparable in size to most late Cretaceous tyrannosaurs, and only outsized by the true 12 m giants like Tarbosaurus baatar and of course Tyrannosaurus rex, showing that these guys have been terrorizing the Mesozoic as alpha predators much earlier than we initially though.

As the fossil record indicates, carnosaurs still ruled the roost in most places during the early Cretaceous, like the British Neovenator salerii (8 m) and the American Acrocanthosaurus atokensis (11.5 m), but mainland east Asia seemed to have belonged to the pioneers of giant tyrannosaurs.