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 NEW YORK (AP) - 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 tip of its tail and standing about 3 feet tall at the hip. It also sported relatively long, three-fingered arms, rather than the two-fingered stubby arms T. rex had. Scientists suspect it had feathers because related dinosaurs did.
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