Name:
Timurlengia
(named after Timurleng, founder of the Timurid Empire).
Phonetic: Tim-ur-len-ge-ah.
Named By: Stephen L. Brusatte, Alexander
Averianov, Hans-Dieter Sues, Amy Muir & Ian B. Butler
- 2016.
Classification: Chordata, Reptilia, Dinosauria,
Saurischia, Theropoda, Coelurosauria, Tyrannosauroidea.
Species: T. euotica (type).
Diet: Carnivore.
Size: Roughly estimated at about 3.5 meter long
for the holotype, but this is possibly of a sub adult, and does not
reflect the true adult size of the genus.
Known locations: Uzbekistan - Bissekty Formation.
Time period: Turonian of the Cretaceous.
Fossil representation: Partial skull, lower jaw,
vertebrae, teeth and claws.
Another
Asian tyrannosaur
that was named early in 2016, Timurlengia has
been named from isolated fossil remains cantered around a braincase
that was first discovered in 2004. The braincase lay in storage at
the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences until
2014 when Stephen Brusatte, a palaeontologist noted for his work
with predatory dinosaurs, realised that the braincase represented a
distinct and undiscovered genus. In 2016, Brusatte and
colleagues published a paper naming the new dinosaur, Timurlengia.
Timurlengia is named in memory of Timurleng, the
founder of the
short lived Timurid Empire which split up shortly after his death in
1405.
Timurlengia
is so far known from only fragmentary remains that suggest a size of
about three to four meters long for this dinosaur. However, these
remains are also from a sub adult, meaning that fully grown adults
would have at least been a little bit larger than this estimate.
Still, Timurlengia would have been a hunter of
smaller to medium
sized dinosaurs, and likely had long the leg proportions that are
commonly seen in smaller tyrannosaurs (though leg length has been
proven to proportionately shorten with age in larger tyrannosaur
genera).
An
additional interesting fact about Timurlengia is
that there has been
enough of the braincase preserved to reveal the construction of the ear
structure, studies of which have revealed two things about this
dinosaur. One is that the inner ear is arranged in such a way that
Timurlengia had a heightened sense of balance,
strongly indicating
that Timurlengia was a very agile predator. The
second is that the
cochlea is proportionately very long, allowing Timurlengia
to hear
very low frequency sounds, possibly below what we could hear
ourselves. It is uncertain how this could have been an advantage in
hunting, but it may have equally allowed for inter species
communication between, such as low frequency growls to be heard
between two or more Timurlengia.
Timurlengia
has been credited with showing that medium sized tyrannosaurs were
present in the early portions of the late Cretaceous, with some
researchers saying that the genus is proof that the tyrannosaurs did
not achieve truly large sizes until the final twenty million years or
so of the Cretaceous. However it must be remembered that other
tyrannosaur genera such as Yutyrannus
lived even earlier than
Timurlengia, and fossil evidence indicates that
they also grew bigger
as well. If anything, what Timurlengia proves
is that as the
tyrannosaurs became the dominant predators in Laurasia, they
diversified upon a genus by genus basis. This would mean lightly
built medium sized (four to eight meters long) tyrannosaurs like
Timurlengia and Alioramus
that hunted more agile prey types, and the
larger (nine meters and more) heavier genera like Tarbosaurus
that
relied more upon brute force for taking down prey.
Further reading
- New tyrannosaur from the mid-Cretaceous of Uzbekistan clarifies
evolution of giant body sizes and advanced senses in tyrant dinosaurs.
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United
States of America. - Stephen L. Brusatte, Alexander Averianov,
Hans-Dieter Sues, Amy Muir & Ian B. Butler - 2016.