'Pinocchio Rex' Is the Newest Member of the Tyrannosaur Family

A new cousin of Tyrannosaurus rex has been discovered, which sheds fresh light on the tyrannosaur family's impressive diversity. The species has been officially named Qianzhousaurus sinensis, but it has already earned the nickname “Pinocchio rex” due to its idiosyncratic long snout. Paleontologists based out of the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences and the University of Edinburgh published their findings about the new species in today's issue of Nature Communications.

The specimen was rooted out by a construction crew working on the outskirts of Ganzhou, China. Fortunately, the workers took care in removing the fossils and delivered them to a local museum. “The specimen is nearly complete and spectacularly preserved, so very little was damaged during the excavation,” paleontologist Steve Brusatte, one of study's authors, told me.

One immediate consequence of the discovery is the formation of a new branch of the tyrannosaur family, characterized by elongated snouts. Alioramus fossils share this unique skull type, but because both surviving specimens were from juveniles, it was previously unclear if they would have developed more typical tyrannosaur heads as adults.

This most recently uncovered dinosaur, however, was right on the cusp of adulthood, suggesting that the Pinocchio-style anatomy was not an awkward adolescent phase, but the trademark of a separate species. The poor thing died with its whole adult life ahead of it, but at least it got to be the inaugural member of the tyrannosaur family's newest sub-clan.

So, to echo an age-old joke, why the long face? Qianzhousaurus shared its turf with larger, deeper-skulled tyrannosaurs like Tarbosaurus, an animal Brusatte calls “the Asian version of T. rex.” In order to stay out of Tarbo's way, it had to evolve a different skill set. “Our suspicion is that the new species was a second-tier apex predator,” Brusatte told me.

“T. rex was the bad boy of the ecosystem, the top dog, using its huge muscular skull to bite through its prey and take down mostly anything it wanted," he said. "The new guy probably relied more on speed and stealth than on brute force.”

The same specialization can be observed in top tier predators today. “[It's] kind of like lions and cheetahs on the savannah,” said Brusatte. “Two different types of cats that generally eat similar things, but their differences in body size and skull shape allow them to eat slightly different prey, and thus coexist.”

In the same way, apex tyrannosaurs like Tarbosaurus specialized in really big game—we're talking hadrosaurs and sauropods—while Qianzhousaurus hunted smaller feathered dinosaurs and lizards. Late Cretaceous Ganzhou was a place and time of great abundance, and there would have been more than enough meat to support both tyrannosaur species. “The environment was warm, probably fairly wet, and teeming with dinosaurs,” said Brusatte.

Unfortunately for both tyrannosaurs, the good times would give way to an unmitigated apocalypse. Qianzhousaurus lived around 66 million years ago, and was wiped out with the rest of the dinosaurs in the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event. According to Brusatte, this gives Qianzhousaurus the distinction of being “one of the last surviving dinosaurs known to science.”

That said, tyrannosaurs aren't the only dinosaurs turning up in this region. “There is a lot of construction work in the Ganzhou area of southern China and a lot of the building sites and road sites are cutting through Cretaceous-aged rocks chock full of dinosaurs,” said Brusatte. “These areas are just starting to be explored thoroughly, but just in the last few years several dinosaurs have been found there, including a big long-necked sauropod and several species of small feathered dinosaurs.”

These discoveries are sure to help contextualize the world that Qianzhousaurus inhabited, back in the good old days before it all collapsed. Their unique build proves that even tyrannosaurs, the most feared carnivores of all time, knew how to share if the environment allowed it.