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Tyrannosaur Ancestral Tree Remains Limbless by Tim Clarey, Ph.D. * Since Darwin's time, the lack of fossil evidence for vertical evolution has always been a problem for secular scientists. Now a recent paper published online in Scientific Reports attempts to map out the ancestry of tyrannosaurs.1 The two authors, Stephen Brusatte and Thomas Carr, hoped that the surge in new discoveries of tyrannosaurs would help in their analysis, noting that the "origins, phylogeny, and evolution of tyrannosaurids were long mysterious."1 However, their results produced no answers…only more questions. In their report, they conclude, "Tyrannosauroids are the subject of more research...

I looked for an existing FR thread on this one and didn't find one. There were a couple of threads from a year or so ago describing the original find but nothing on the more recent news. Researchers in 2005 broke a tyrannosaur bone in half to get it on a small helicopter which was all they had available and found soft tissue inside the bone including what looked like raw meet, blood vessels, and blood. More recently, collagen and proteins from this bone have been sequenced and turnout to be altogether similar to those of chickens. The tyrannosaur apparently...

NEW YORK - Scientists say they've found the earliest known tyrannosaur, shedding light on the lineage that produced the fearsome Tyrannosaurus rex. The discovery comes with a puzzle: Why did this beast have a strange crest on its head? Digging in the badlands of northwestern China that appeared in the movie "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," researchers found two skeletons of a creature that lived some 160 million years ago. That's more than 90 million years before T. rex came along. A two-legged meat-eater, the beast was far smaller than T. rex, measuring about 10 feet from its snout to the...