Australian tyrannosaur discovered

This video is called Planet Dinosaur – Documentary 2015 BBC Planet Dinosaur Ep 1 2 3 [BBC Documentary Full Movie].

From Scientific American:

Mar 25, 2010 02:01 PM

New Australian dinosaur fossil shows that tyrannosaurs‘s range was global

By Katherine Harmon

Tyrannosaur bones are relatively familiar finds on the northern continents of the globe, cropping up everywhere from modern-day Colorado to China. But until now, they appeared to be oddly missing from the southern half of the globe. The discovery of a distinctively tyrannosaur-like hipbone in Victoria, Australia, however, might change the way scientists think about the distribution—and evolution—of this infamous group of dinosaurs.

“The absence of tyrannosauroids from the southern continents was becoming more and more anomalous as representatives of other ‘northern’ dinosaur groups started to show up in the south,” Paul Barrett, of the Department of Paleontology at the Natural History Museum in London and a coauthor of the new report, said in a prepared statement.

The hipbone fossil is 30 centimeters long. “The bone is unambiguously identifiable as a tyrannosaur because these dinosaurs have very distinctive hip bones,” asserted lead study author Roger Benson, of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge, in a prepared statement.

Extrapolating from the size of the hipbone, the researchers estimate that the new tyrannosaur would have been about the size of a person, measuring some three meters long and weighing in at about 80 kilograms. The animal lived in the Early Cretaceous, when members of the family were still small compared to the towering, Late Cretaceous Tyrannosaurus rex.

This as-yet unnamed dinosaur lived about 110 million years ago—about 40 million years before its revered relative the T. rex. At this time, the southern continents (Australia, Africa, South America and Antarctica) were still connected to each other, providing the researchers with “hints at the possibilities that others remain to be discovered in Africa, South America and India,” Barrett said. The fossil find was detailed online on March 25 in Science.

Why did this group of dinosaurs appear to be so small and scant in the southern hemisphere while some tyrannosaurs later on were massive, dominating predators in the northern hemisphere? “It is difficult to explain why different groups succeeded in the north and south if they originally existed in both places,” Benson said. “We can only answer these questions with new discoveries.”

See also here. And here. And here. And here.

Tyrannosaurs plodded like elephants: here.

How did dinosaurs endure up to six months of cold and total darkness? Fossils from Australia are telling the strange story of polar dinosaurs: here.

Discoveries of Australian dinosaurs add fuel to the fiery debate about whether they were warm- or cold-blooded creatures: here.

From killers of the freezing Antarctic wastes to titanic herbivores, Australian dinos are being dug up in great numbers: here.

A 120-MILLION-YEAR-OLD dinosaur footprint was among a series of fossils illegally removed from a sacred Aboriginal site in Broome, WA in the mid-90s. The footprint was recovered on 30 December 1998, its thief charged thereafter, while another invaluable fossil remains missing and shrouded in mystery: here.

Caltech-led team first to directly measure body temperatures of extinct vertebrates: here.

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