Instead, Woodward points out, because it took T. Study of the bones using histology led the researchers to the conclusion that the skeletons were juvenile T. rex at all, but a smaller pygmy relative Nanotyrannus. There had been speculation that the two small skeletons weren’t T. Woodward and her colleagues also found that by counting the annual rings within the bone, much like counting tree rings, Jane and Petey were teenaged T.rex when they died 13 and 15 years old, respectively. rex was growing as fast as modern-day warm-blooded animals such as mammals and birds. “And by comparing these fossilized microstructures to similar features found in modern bone, we know they provide clues to metabolism, growth rate, and age.” “To me, it’s always amazing to find that if you have something like a huge fossilized dinosaur bone, it’s fossilized on the microscopic level as well,” Woodward said. Woodward and her team removed thin slices from the leg bones of Jane and Petey and examined them at high magnification. rex matured, but they can also utilize paleohistology– the study of fossil bone microstructure– to learn about juvenile growth rates and ages. Not only can scientists now study how the bones and proportions changed as T. The smaller size of Jane and Petey is what makes them so incredibly important. So, for a long while we’ve had large gaps in our understanding of how dinosaurs grew up, and T. “The problem is that those smaller fossils may be from younger animals.
“Historically, many museums would collect the biggest, most impressive fossils of a dinosaur species for display and ignore the others,” said Woodward. Supplemental histological work was conducted at the Diane Gabriel Histology Labs at Museum of the Rockies/Montana State University. The study “Growing up Tyrannosaurus rex: histology refutes pygmy ‘Nanotyrannus’ and supports ontogenetic niche partitioning in juvenile Tyrannosaurus” appears in the peer-reviewed journal Science Advances.Ĭo-authors include Jack Horner, presidential fellow at Chapman University Nathan Myhrvold, founder and CEO of Intellectual Ventures Katie Tremaine, graduate student at Montana State University Scott Williams, paleontology lab and field specialist at Museum of the Rockies and Lindsay Zanno, division head of paleontology at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.
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