Paleontologists have long hailed Tyrannosaurus rex as king of the dinosaurs. Now, the name “T. rex” also belongs to a newly described extinct carnivore — a massive marine reptile with the scientific name Tylosaurus rex that a trio of researchers uncovered after a hefty amount of detective work.The freshly crowned T. rex wasn’t a dinosaur but a mosasaur, a gigantic ocean apex predator that lived about 80 million years ago — a bit earlier than the dinosaur king, which lived 68 million to 66 million years ago — and measured up to 43 feet (13 meters) long. The sleuthing scientists identified the species from fossils attributed for decades to a closely related mosasaur.Like the land-dwelling T. rex (rex means king in Latin), the huge creature ruled its habitat, its sawlike teeth tearing into its prey — fish, turtles and long-necked marine reptiles called plesiosaurs — “really crunching through and ripping them up,” said Amelia Zietlow, a paleontologist with the History Museum at the Castle in Appleton, Wisconsin. Zietlow is lead author of a new study describing Tylosaurus rex, published May 21 in the journal Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History.AdvertisementAdvertisementFossils of the long-snouted swimmer were found in what’s now Texas and date back about 80 million years to the latter part of the Cretaceous Period, a time when an inland sea partly covered the North American continent. For the new study, Zietlow and her coauthors examined and reclassified fossils housed in more than a dozen institutions — specimens that had been misidentified as the species Tylosaurus proriger.“Here we …
