At the bottom of a drawer, he stumbles upon a completely new dinosaur species

Fossils had been abandoned in a drawer at the scientific institute in the city of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia.

The bones, discovered in the 1970s, had not been assigned to the correct species. It was only recently that Jared Voris, a young Canadian doctoral student, identified the major mistake. As Darla Zelenitsky, palaeontologist at the University of Calgary and co-author of the study published in Nature, reports, the young researcher quickly sensed that something was amiss. The researcher explains that the identified animal measured nearly 4 metres long and weighed about 750 kg, or “the size of a very large horse”.

This discovery proves just how surprising poorly archived fossils can be. “It is possible that other such discoveries are lying dormant in other museums,” says Zelenitsky.

The ancestor of Tyrannosaurus rex

Khankhuuluu mongoliensis (or “dragon prince of Mongolia”), as the animal has been identified, allows for a better understanding of the migrations and evolution of the tyrannosaurids, a family that is difficult to classify and of which the T-rex is the last representative, according to the media outlet 20 Minutes. The animal is believed to have lived nearly 20 million years before Tyrannosaurus rex, making it its ancestor.

According to the researchers, the dinosaur managed to cross the ancient land bridge that once linked North America to Asia. It was thanks to this crossing that various lineages such as the “Pinocchio rex” or Tarbosaurus could have emerged. Conversely, other gigantic specimens may have made the journey back to Asia even before the T-Rex was born. In North America, it was the king of predators before disappearing 66 million years ago.

(MH with Raphaël Liset - Source: 20 Minutes - Illustration: © Unsplash)