T Rex dinosaur tale gets a China twist
By Raja Murthy
MUMBAI - A 125 million-year-old smuggled Chinese ancestor of Tyrannosaurus Rex
has twisted the dinosaur tale and shaken established evolutionary theories
about one of the most powerful creatures to have trodden Earth.
Tyrannosaurus Rex, meaning "tyrant lizard", loomed 4.6 to 6 meters (15 to 20
feet) tall, averaged 12 meters in length and used its 1.5-meter-long skull to
maul prey.
This fearsome T Rex, as the Tyrannosaurus is hailed in popular culture after
Steven Spielberg's blockbuster Jurassic Park movie series, now
apparently has an ancestor not much larger in size than an average human. The
evolutionary downgrading was one-hundredth its size but astonishingly exact in
features.
The twist in the tale was the outcome of the skeletal remains of
"Raptorex Kriegsteini" meeting University of Chicago's Paul Sereno, one of the
world's leading dinosaur experts.
The three-meter long Raptorex dinosaur skeleton was smuggled out of northern
China to the US. It found its way to a fossil show in Tucson, Arizona, from
where a private collector, Dr Henry Kriegstein, bought the Chinese-origin
dinosaur remains without knowing its significance.
The 60-year-old Kriegstein, an eye surgeon and alumni of Harvard and Stanford
Universities, contacted Paul Sereno. Sereno and his five colleagues [1] were
stunned with the find.
"It shows that tyrannosaur design evolved at 'punk size', basically our body
weight," said Sereno, who has traveled across the world, including China and
India, on the multi-million years old dinosaur trail. "And that's pretty
staggering, because there's no other example that I can think of where an
animal has been so finely designed at about 100th the size that it would
eventually become."
The
Raptorex had all the hallmark features of its famous descendant: the large
predatory head and powerful feet but tiny arms. In other words, it's a
remarkable "bonsai" version of the mighty T Rex.
"It's really stolen from tyrannosaurids all the fire of the group," said
Sereno. "All that Raptorex left for its descendants is a suite of detailed
features largely related to getting bigger." He calls Raptorex "jaws on feet".
The Chinese dinosaur was named "Raptorex Kriegsteini" after Kriegstein's
parents Roman and Cecile Kriegstein, both Holocaust survivors from Poland, as
some consolation at having to part with his dinosaur fossil. Raptorex
Kriegsteini is to be returned to a museum in northern China, the region where
he stayed buried for 90 million years before being unlawfully excavated and
smuggled out. [2]
The Raptorex species domineeringly lived across Asia and North America, about
30 million years before the mysterious cataclysm that suddenly wiped out
dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
But to what extent was Asia populated with dinosaurs, Asia Times Online asked
Sereno.
"Just as populated as the rest of the world," he said. "But the more important
variable here is that China in particular has great deserts and exposed rock
that preserved dinosaurs fossils, like North America and Argentina." Sereno
says deserts are the best places for fossils, as the vast, uninhabited expanses
leave undisturbed remains of life forms of long ago.
The Raptorex continues the puzzle of a life form that lorded over Earth over
100 million years longer than human beings have, but which suddenly vanished.
T Rex, Raptorex and family belonged to the "Mesozoic Period" that began 248
million years ago, and comprised the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods,
the last of which ended 65 million years ago.
Our entire human history doesn't as yet merit a microscopic dot in this
timeline, a reason why the dinosaur tale rarely fails to fascinate and grip the
mind. If these mighty creatures, dominant for millions of years, can suddenly
vanish in a blink of time, so can we as a species. It makes for a healthy
ego-shattering illustration of the utter unimportance and insignificance of
this individual "I". The smaller the ego "I", the lesser life's tensions and
greater one's happiness.
The time scale of dinosaur curiosity has ranged down thousands of years, from
the ancient dragon and monster legends to the fossil of the Megalosaurus
dinosaur found in Europe, circa 1824, as the first scientifically described
remains of the species.
"Dinosaurs represent a lost world that people love to imagine, especially
kids," says the 51-year-old Sereno, who grew up in the Chicago suburb of
Naperville. "This is a strange world of bizarre animals, but it was real."
Sereno told Asia Times Online that he was captivated for life following a
behind-the-scenes tour of a museum. Dinosaurs and the prehistoric study of
paleontology soon became to him an irresistible "combination of science,
adventure, travel, art, biology and geology".
This multi-dimensional ticket took Sereno on multiple expeditions to Africa,
South America and Asia in the past 20 years. He first made worldwide news with
his 1991 discovery of the "Sinornis", the world's second-oldest fossil of a
bird species that lived 135 million years ago in China. The sparrow-sized bird,
which Sereno put together from fossils that a Chinese colleague sent, is the
oldest known creature that could fly and perch in the manner of birds we see in
our present-day world.
So what was the human-less world of dinosaurs like, 65 to 100 million years
ago, I wondered? Did the full moon 70 million years ago look the same as it
does now? Was there a worldwide silence, broken only by the howling of the wind
through trees, I asked Sereno. Was it an Earth very different from the one in
which we live? Was there a stillness not even interrupted by a bird song?
"No, it was much like today," Sereno said. "There were plenty of birds. Earth
had no ice caps, water levels were higher, the climate more moderate. Many of
the animals we know today were there - turtles, crocodiles, birds, tiny mammals
- when T Rex lived."
Sereno's dinosaur journey continued with the Rajasaurus that Paul Sereno
discovered during his trip to India in 2001 [3]. This 10-meter-long stocky,
carnivorous colleague of T Rex had a distinct, crown-like head crest that
contributed to its kingly name ("Raja" means "king" in Indian languages).
New dinosaur finds such as the Rajasaurus are expected to also help scientists
understand better the little-known process behind how India detached itself
from Africa, Australia and the Antarctica land mass, and collided with Asia to
form the Himalayas.
India's Rajasaurus jigsaw may also be a crucial clue to solving the biggest
dinosaur mystery of all: how and why did T Rex and friends perish 65 million
years ago?
A paper [4] published this May from the Geological Society of London has
debunked a three-decade-old theory of dinosaur extinction. According to this
theory, a giant extra-terrestrial object, probably a meteorite, struck
Chicxulub in Mexico's Yucatan peninsula, created a 180-kilometer-wide crater
and wiped out over 60% of all species on Earth, including the entire dinosaur
master clan.
But Gerta Keller, a geo-sciences professor at Princeton University, and her
colleagues say volcanic eruptions in India's Deccan plateau may be the culprit.
Sulfur dioxide spewing out of these volcanic eruptions in India between 63 and
67 million years ago could have mass-murdered dinosaurs.
Their paper from the London Geological Society says dinosaurs lived on 300,000
years after the extra-terrestrial impact that caused the Chicxulub crater and
worldwide havoc.
One-third of India's land mass is even now covered with lava. The Deccan
plateau, that forms the 240,200 square kilometers peninsula chunk of India,
could hold more such secrets of the Rajasaurus kind that Professor Sereno
identified.
Meanwhile, the revelation of T Rex's Chinese ancestor has given the latest
twist in the 125 million-year dinosaur story of how nothing lasts forever, and
things constantly change.
Notes
1. Paper titled "Tyrannosaurid Skeletal Design First Evolved at Small Body
Size". By Paul C Sereno (University of Chicago); Lin Tan (Long Hao Institute of
Geology and Paleontology, China); Stephen L Brusatte (American Museum of
Natural History, New York); Henry J Kriegstein (Evergreen Lane, Higham, MA
02043, USA); Xijin Zhao (Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China); and
Karen Cloward (Western Paleontological Laboratories, Utah, US). Published in
Science, September 17, 2009.
2. The Raptorex Kriegsteini project funded by the Whitten-Newman Foundation and
the National Geographic Society. The National Geographic TV Channel is also
telecasting a World Premiere Special on the Raptorex, in the programme Bizarre
Dinos, 8 pm ET/PT Sunday, October 11.
3. Suresh Srivastava, Geological Survey of India, and Ashok Sahni, Punjab
University, discovered the Rajasaurus remains in 1983 in the Narmada Valley in
western India. They collected hundreds of bones that had to wait for 18 years
before a joint Indian-American research project led by Paul Sereno, Jeff
Wilson, Srivastava and Sahni put the fossil puzzle together: it was the
first-ever assembled skull of a dinosaur of any kind found in India.
4. Paper titled "New evidence concerning the age and biotic effects of the
Chicxulub impact in NE Mexico", by Gerta Keller, Thierry Adatte, Alfonso Pardo
Juez and Jose G Lopez-Oliva. Journal of the Geological Society, London, 2009
volume 166: 393-41.
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The
Raptorex had all the hallmark features of its famous descendant: the large
predatory head and powerful feet but tiny arms. In other words, it's a
remarkable "bonsai" version of the mighty T Rex.
