Rise of the Tyrannosaurs

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On a sweltering summer day in 2010, a construction worker in the southeastern Chinese city of Ganzhou was digging the foundation for a building when his backhoe smashed into something hard. Climbing down to see what it was, he probably expected the worst—impenetrable bedrock, an old water main or some other nuisance that would inevitably delay completion of the sprawling industrial park his crew was racing to finish. But when the dirt and smoke cleared, a very different culprit came into focus: bones—lots of them, some enormous.

Construction did indeed stop that day because the bones turned out to be a major discovery. The worker had stumbled on a nearly complete skeleton of a bizarre new dinosaur species related to . A few years later my Chinese colleagues invited me to help study the specimen, and in May 2014 we unveiled it as the latest addition to the tyrannosaur family tree: . The formal name is something of a tongue twister, so we gave it a cheeky nickname, “,” in reference to its peculiar long snout.

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