Dave Hone: belief

Transcript context

…Can you speak to the evolution from the smaller to the bigger of the T-Rex? What were some of the evolutionary pressures? What’s the story of the evolution? So tyrannosaurs go back to the Middle Jurassic. So tyrannosaurs were around for a hundred million years. So from about 160-ish, 165-ish million years till the extinction. 66.5, I think, is the current dating on that. So yeah, you’ve got a hundred million years of them. And the Middle Jurassic, annoyingly, is probably the bit of the Mesozoic—so the whole dinosaur period—that we know the least of. Just by chance, we just don’t have many rocks exposed of the right age that are fossil-bearing. But we’ve got two or three tyrannosaurs from that time. And yeah, they’re really quite diddy. Yeah, they’d be chest-high to us, two or three meters long, including the tail. Probably more like three, a lot of them. Little heads, long arms. They look every other carnivore going. There’s not a lot special to them at this point. They’ve only just separated from their nearest groups, which is actually something like the ancestors of Giganotosaurus, actually. They do have the fused nasals early on. They do have these special little teeth at the front of the jaw very early on. They’re feathered early on. Definitively, we have skeletons with feathers on them that are early tyrannosaurs at least until the Early Cretaceous. But yeah, they’re knocking around as relatively small animals in Europe and Asia. We have a couple from the UK. We have a whole bunch from China. There’s stuff from, like, Kyrgyzstan and places like this. I think there’s one, a relatively early one from Russia. And then when they get into the Early Cretaceous, they start getting quite a bit bigger. So someone like Yutyrannus, if you want to… There you go. So Yutyrannus is fuzzy. We have three specimens definitively feathered. It gets— to six, seven meters long. There’s something funny-looking about the sexy, smaller, earlier version of the T-Rex.…

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