New Tyrannosaur named 'Pinocchio rex'

A new type of Tyrannosaur with a very long nose has been nicknamed “Pinocchio rex,” the BBC reports.

The ferocious carnivore, nine metres long with a distinctive horny snout, was a cousin of Tyrannosaurus rex.

Its skeleton was dug up in a Chinese construction site and identified by scientists at Edinburgh University, UK.

The 66-million-year-old predator, officially named Qianzhousaurus sinensis, is described in Nature Communications.

"Pinocchio" looked very different to other tyrannosaurs.

"It had the familiar toothy grin of T. rex, but its snout was long and slender, with a row of horns on top," said Edinburgh's Dr Steve Brusatte.

"It might have looked a little comical, but it would have been as deadly as any other tyrannosaur, and maybe even a little faster and stealthier.

"We thought it needed a nickname, and the long snout made us think of Pinocchio's long nose."

Researchers now believe several different tyrannosaur types lived alongside each other in Asia during the Cretaceous Period - hunting different prey.

The larger Tarbosaurus (up to 13m) had deep and powerful jaws like T. rex - strong enough to crush through the bones of giant herbivores.

The thinner teeth of Qianzhousaurus (9m) suggest it targeted smaller creatures, such as feathered dinosaurs and lizards.

Pinocchio's snout was 35% longer than animals of its size. So, why the long face?

"The truth is we don't know yet. But it must've been doing something different," Dr Brusatte told BBC News.

"The iconic picture of a tyrannosaur is T. Rex, the biggest, baddest dinosaur of all.

"But this new dinosaur had a lighter skeleton. Perhaps it had a faster bite and hunted in a different way. It breaks the mould for what we think of as a tyrannosaur."

The discovery of "Pinocchio" settles an argument over a series of strange new tyrannosaur fossils.

In recent years, two skeletons with unusually prominent proboscises were dug up in Mongolia.

They appeared to come from an entirely new branch of the tyrannosaur family.

"The problem was, both of them were juveniles. So it was possible their long snouts were just a weird transient feature that eventually grows out in adults," said Dr Brusatte.

But the new skeleton is an almost fully mature adult. It was found largely intact and remarkably well preserved by road construction workers near Ganzhou in southern China.

"The new specimen is twice the size of the juveniles, and it still has the same features - including the distinctive horns," said Dr Brusatte.

"It's the slam dunk we needed: the long-snouted tyrannosaurs were real."

Their discovery from Mongolia to southern China suggests the long-snouted tyrannosaurs were widely distributed in Asia, according to Prof Junchang Lu of the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences, a co-author on the paper.

"Although we are only starting to learn about them, the long-snouted tyrannosaurs were apparently one of the main groups of predatory dinosaurs in Asia," he said.