Juratyrant, new Jurassic tyrannosauroid from Britain

[Ben Creisler <bcreisler@gmail.com>]

From: Ben Creisler
bcreisler@gmail.com


A new online paper:


Stephen L. Brusatte and Roger B.J. Benson (2012)
The systematics of Late Jurassic tyrannosauroids (Dinosauria:
Theropoda) from Europe and North America.
Acta Palaeontologica Polonica (in press)
doi:10.4202/app.2011.0141
http://app.pan.pl/article/item/app20110141.html


Recent discoveries of more than ten new species of tyrannosauroid
theropods are helping to understand the origin and evolution of
colossal body size and other characteristic features of Tyrannosaurus
rex and its terminal Cretaceous relatives. Particularly important has
been the discovery and reinterpretation of Late Jurassic
tyrannosauroids from Europe and North America, which are intermediate
in size and phylogenetic position between small basal tyrannosauroids
and the largest Late Cretaceous species. The fragmentary nature of
these Jurassic specimens, however, has frustrated attempts to
understand their systematics and phylogeny. A new specimen from the
Late Jurassic of England was recently named as a new species (S.
langhami) of the genus Stokesosaurus, which is known from several
fragmentary fossils from North America. We review the systematics and
phylogeny of these European and North American specimens and show that
there are no unequivocal synapomorphies uniting them. Furthermore, a
revised phylogenetic analysis does not recover them as sister taxa.
This necessitates a taxonomic revision of this material, and we name a
new genus (Juratyrant) for the British specimen.