The Tyrannosaur Chronicles: The Biology of the Tyrant Dinosaurs

About this book

In the mid-nineteenth century many dinosaur fossils were found in the United States especially during the 1870s and 1880s "Bone Wars." Paleontologists Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh discovered dozens of skeletons but in 1905 fossil hunter Barnum Brown named the first tyrannosaur known to science--Tyrannosaurus rex. Tyrannosaurus was an impressive beast; it topped five tons was more than thirty-five feet (twelve meters) long and had the largest head and most powerful bite of any land animal ever. Tyrannosaurs started small just a couple of yards long and over the course of 100 million years evolved into giant meat-slicing bone crushers. As of 2015 there were nearly 30 described species of tyrannosaur but during the last decade at least one new species has been identified and named every year greatly improving what we know about how they lived fed bred and died. THE TYRANNOSAUR CHRONICLES tracks the rise of these dinosaurs and presents the latest research into their biology showing off more than just their impressive statistics--tyrannosaurs had feathers and fought and even ate one another. Indeed David Hone tells the evolutionary story of the group through their anatomy ecology and behavior exploring how they came to be the dominant terrestrial predators of the Mesozoic--and more recently one of the great icons of biology.