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SALT LAKE CITY — Weighing in at more than 2 tons and two dozen feet long, a new species of dinosaur related to Tyrannosaurus rex was fierce enough to be dubbed "King of Gore."
The discovery of "Lythronax argestes" at the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah was announced Wednesday at the Natural History Museum of Utah and coincides with the publication of a study in PLOS ONE, an open access scientific journal.
The study, funded by Bureau of Land Management and the National Science Foundation, was led by Mark Loewen, research associate at the Natural History Museum of Utah and adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Geology and Geophysics at the University of Utah.
Scientists say the discovery of Lythronax is particularly noteworthy because of what it reveals about the tyrannosaur family, which is a group of small- to large-bodied bipedal carnivorous dinosaurs. Previously, paleontologists believed this type of wide-skulled tyrannosaurid only appeared 70 million years ago, whereas Lythronax shows it had evolved at least 10 million years earlier.
Among his contemporaries, Lythronax is unique because of the size of his skull, which is much wider. Paleontologists believe that gave him "binocular vision," which would have been incredibly useful in his role as a predator.
Lythronax, the largest carnivore in the ecosystem, lived 80 million years ago during the Late Cretaceous period when western North America was an island continent called Laramidia. His discovery at the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by BLM's Scott Richardson in 2009 adds to a bevy of new dinosaurs unearthed at the monument, which spans 1.9 million acres of high desert terrain that was the last area in the contiguous United States to be mapped.
Over the last 14 years, scientists have found more than a dozen species of dinosaurs at the monument, leading them to dub it the largest bone yard in North America, offering enticing discoveries to come.
Paleontologists are intrigued that the dinosaurs of southern Laramidia — which is Utah, New Mexico, Texas and Mexico — "differ" at the species level from their counterparts in the north in Montana, the Dakotas and Canada. Such distinctions coexisting at the same time are curious given that a determined dinosaur would have been able to walk from Alaska to Mexico if time permitted.
The King of Gore has been pieced together in his skeletal form and is on display at the museum's Past Worlds Gallery, in addition to two skulls belonging to the King of Gore.
