I recently covered how scientists are finally piecing together the puzzle of why the Tyrannosaurus rex had such tiny, pathetic, laughably small arms. Today, science has brought you news of the T. rex variety again, except this one is more spiritually Tyrannosaurus rex than literally. According to new research published in the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History, paleontologists have identified a gigantic ancient marine predator they’re now calling the “Tyrannosaurus rex of the ocean.”
Reuters reports that its actual name is Tylosaurus rex, a newly classified species of mosasaur that ruled the seas roughly 80 million years ago during the Cretaceous Period. It was a swimmer, a big whale-looking thing with a ferocious set of jaws as it cruised along the inland ocean that at one point divided North America.
Paleontologists Found the ‘Tyrannosaurus Rex of the Ocean,’ and It Was Sitting in a Museum the Whole Time
The research team says that this gigantic predator could grow up to 43 feet long, making it larger than any modern shark and roughly the same size as the land counterpart its name is inspired by. Scientists finally identified the species after years of re-examining fossils that had been labeled as another mosasaur species called Tylosaurus proriger.
What finally tipped them off that this was a completely different species was its heavier jaw and neck muscles, its fine, serrated teeth that seemed perfectly suited to shredding flesh, and its overall powerful skull structure for chomping. The researchers think all of these tools combined to create a creature that preyed on fish, sea turtles, plesiosaurs, and, in general, anything unfortunate enough to be swimming by when hunger struck.
All that is pretty fascinating unto itself, but maybe the most interesting part of it all is that the team behind this particular study didn’t have to dig up even one bone. All the fossils they examined had been sitting in museum collections for decades. All the research team did was be the first to finally realize that scientists over the previous decades had been misidentifying the species.
Sometimes, even the most fearsome beasts in history get shoved into a storage container and forgotten.
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