CANNAB, Utah – The Land Management Office has launched a new study condemning the frightening Tyrannosaurus rex traveling in packs and not being a lone hunter, as previously thought.
The study, released Monday, came from years of work at a fossil site inside the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah.
Dr. Alan Titus, BLENT Palentologist, discovered the Rainbows and Unicorns career site in 2014.
“We immediately realized that this site could be used to test the idea of a social tyrannosaurus. Unfortunately, the ancient history of the site is complicated “, said Titus. “With bones that appear to have been exhumed and reburied by the action of a river, the original context in which they stretched was destroyed. However, not everything was lost. ”
“The new Utah site adds to the growing body of evidence that tyrannosaurs were complex, large predators capable of common social behavior in many of their living relatives, birds,” said Dr. Joe Sertich, curator of dinosaurs at Denver Museum of Nature and Science. “This discovery should be the tipping point for reconsidering how these top carnivores behaved and hunted in the northern hemisphere during the Cretaceous.”
Researchers believe that tyrannosaurs died during a flood that washed away their remains in a lake.
In addition to the 12 tyrannosaurs, the crew found fossils from other dinosaurs, turtles and a 12-meter-long Deinosuchus alligator.
The Land Management Office is proud to announce new innovative research on the social behavior of tyrannosaurs! To learn more, visit https://t.co/iWPtLzZvwe. pic.twitter.com/wq82eYRruo
– Utah Office of Land Management (@BLMUtah) April 19, 2021
Titus called it “a very important site that we found in 2014. A unique one, the first of its kind in the southern United States.”
The fossils date back 76.4 million years.
The press release said the researchers will be on site for years to come.