See inside brain of 'T rex' relative

A model of a ‘Tyrannosaurus rex’ in the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science in Albuquerque. Picture: AP

A model of a ‘Tyrannosaurus rex’ in the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science in Albuquerque. Picture: AP

Published Aug 17, 2017

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Los Angeles - Researchers at a top US laboratory have announced that they had produced the highest resolution scan ever done of the inner workings of a fossilised tyrannosaur skull using neutron beams and high-energy X-rays. The new clues could help palaeontologists piece together the evolutionary puzzle of Tyrannosaurus rex (Trex).

Officials with Los Alamos National Laboratory and the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science said they were able to peer deep into the skull of a “Bisti Beast”, a Trex relative that lived millions of years ago.

The images detail the brain and sinus cavities, pathways of some nerves and blood vessels and teeth that formed but never emerged.

Thomas Williamson, the museum’s curator of palaeontology and part of the team that originally collected the specimen in the 1990s, said the scans were helping palaeontologists figure out how the different species within the Trex family related to one another and how they evolved.

“We’re unveiling the internal anatomy of the skull so we’re going to see things that nobody has ever seen before,” he said.

The fossilised remnants of the “Bisti Beast”, or Bistahieversor sealeyi, were found in the Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness Area. New Mexico. Dusty badlands, the area in the time of the tyrannosaur would have been a warm, swampy environment with more trees. The species lived about 10 million years before Trex.

Scientists have said it represents one of the early tyrannosaurs that had many of the advanced features - big-headed, bone-crushing characteristics and small forelimbs - that were integral for the survival of Trex.

Officials said the dinosaur’s skull was the largest object to date for which full, high-resolution neutron and X-ray CT scans had been done at Los Alamos. The thickness of the skull, which spans 102cm, required stronger X-rays than those typically available to penetrate the fossil.

Sven Vogel, who works at the Los Alamos Neutron Science Centre, said the 3-D scanning capabilities at the lab had produced images that allowed palaeontologists to see the dinosaur much as it would have been at the time of its death, rather than just the dense mineral outline of the fossil left behind after tens of millions of years.

Kat Schroeder, a PhD candidate at the University of New Mexico who has been working on the project for about a year, said the scanning technology had the ability to uncover detail absent in traditional X-rays, and the resulting 3-D images could be shared with fellow researchers around the world without compromising the integrity of the original.

Schroeder’s work centres on understanding the behaviour of dinosaurs, so seeing the unerupted teeth in the “Bisti Beast’s” upper jaw was exciting. “Looking at how fast they’re replacing teeth tells us something about how fast they’re growing, how much energy they need and how active they were.” 

ANA-AP

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