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The remains of a dinosaur skull found in British Columbia campground belonged to a tyrannosaur that was lighter and faster than its more famous relative, the T. rex, say the authors of a new study.
University of Alberta researchers studied the cast of a partial skull impression that was left about 76 million years ago and discovered it belonged to a horned dinosaur known as Gorgosaurus.
Their findings, published in the journal Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology last month, give new insight into a species that once roamed what is now Western Canada, said lead author Colton Coppock.
“We were able to identify [Gorgosaurus] based on a unique set of characteristics on this impression,” Coppock said.
The Royal Tyrrell Museum in Alberta says the species could reach nine metres in length.
Found near the river’s edge
The journey toward the dinosaur’s identification started in 2017, when B.C. resident Rick Lambert found a strange-looking rock at a campground in Tumbler Ridge, near the Alberta boundary, during a hike.
Lambert said a childhood spent hunting for fossils in England gave him a keen eye — though it also helped that a squirrel directed his attention to the rock near the river’s edge.
The Tumbler Ridge Museum Foundation sent one of its paleontologists to take a look at the find, and it turned out that Lambert had uncovered the first tyrannosaurus skull ever found in B.C.
“We do have a lot of dinosaur material here, just not a lot of bone material,” the museum’s curator Eamon Drysdale said, adding the museum keeps the original impression found etched in a sandstone block preserved under tight environmental controls.
A preserved impression
The imprint of partial skull bones included the dinosaur’s maxilla, or upper jaw.
Though most of the actual bone had eroded away, the impression was well preserved enough that researchers were able to create a highly-detailed cast that kept the skull’s unique features.
Coppock said his supervisor dropped the cast on his lap at a barbecue last August, and he immediately knew it likely belonged to Gorgosaurus libratus.
The species lived 76 million years ago, about 10 million years before its T. rex cousin was stomping around.
“It’s probably like T. rex’s great-uncle,” Coppock said.
Calgary’s Telus Spark Science Centre says its latest dinosaur exhibit, featuring SUE, transports people back 67 million years. At 40 feet long and 13 feet tall, Spark officials say SUE is the most complete and best-preserved Tyrannosaurus rex ever discovered.
The dinosaurs had similar stubby arms and long tails, but Gorgosaurus had triangular horns above its eyes, Coppock said.
“They’re kind of the more lightly built tyrannosaurs with longer limbs. Think of like a faster T. rex,” Coppock said.
The cast allowed Coppock and his co-authors to see the internal surface of the maxilla and compare it to more complete Gorgosaurus skull bones.
Gorgosaurus is one of the most well documented tyrannosaurs in Alberta, and was one of the first dinosaurs discovered in the province’s Dinosaur Park Formation, giving the researchers a lot to work with.
Some of the clues linking the partial skull to Gorgosaurus included bone sutures in the nasal area and a rod of bone separating openings in its upper jaw that were distinct to the dinosaur, Coppock said.
He said the dinosaur’s teeth showed it was likely a juvenile when it died.
“Since these animals don’t have large, really muscular jaws early on in life, we think they were using these incisiform teeth to precisely cut up flesh, rather than just going in with brute force and taking huge chunks out with their blade-like teeth [like the adults],” he said.
A new research frontier
The researchers also learned that the species traversed a much larger area than previously thought, similar to the expanse covered by grizzly bears and cougars today, Coppock said.
He also said the dinosaur’s range extended from the north part of eastern B.C. down to northern Montana, spanning around 198,000 square kilometres.
Lambert’s discovery points to British Columbia as a potential gold mine of future dinosaur discoveries.
“B.C. is kind of like the new frontier in terms of dinosaur research,” Coppock said.
But for Lambert, finding the fossil all those years ago meant something more.
“It represents the stability of our planet,” he said.
“We live in an amazing place. Where things that have lived, have lived for so long. That is an incredible thing.”
