‘Dragon prince’ dinosaur discovery 'rewrites' T.rex family tree

The dinosaur skeletons, found hidden in a museum collection in Mongolia, is an ancestor of the mighty tyrannosaurs.

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Researchers concluded that two 86 million-year-old skeletons they studied belonged to a species that is now the closest known ancestor of all tyrannosaurs - the group of predators that includes the iconic T.rex.

The researchers named the species Khankhuuluu (pronounced khan-KOO-loo) mongoliensis, meaning Dragon Prince of Mongolia.

The discovery, published in Nature, is a window into how tyrannosaurs evolved to become powerful predators that terrorised North America and Asia until the end of the reign of the dinosaurs.

"'Prince' refers to this being an early, smaller tyrannosauroid," explained Prof Darla Zelenitsky, a palaeontologist from the University of Calgary in Canada. Tyrannosauroids are the superfamily of carnivorous dinosaurs that walked on two legs.