Grand Staircase-Escalante Natl Monument - Crews from the Natural History Museum of Utah, with help from the Denver Museum of Nature and Sciences and several other groups have unearthed a new dinosaur species, belonging to the same evolutionary branch as the famous Tyrannosaurus Rex.
The new species is being called Lythronax argestes.
Lythronax translates as “king of gore,” and the second part of the name, argestes, refers to its geographic location in the American Southwest.
Previously, paleontologists thought this type of wide-skulled tyrannosaurid only appeared 70 million years ago, but the Lythronax shows it had evolved at least 10 million years earlier.
The Lythronax possesses several unique features, a short narrow snout with a wide back of the skull with forward-oriented eyes.
The skeleton was initially discovered by BLM employee Scott Richardson in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah.
More than a dozen species of dinosaurs have been unearthed at SSENM in the past 14 years.
"Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument is the last great, largely unexplored dinosaur boneyard in the lower 48 states," said Dr. Scott Sampson.
Learn more: http://tinyurl.com/nxp58hm