Disproving a previous theory that tyrannosaurs never lived in the Southern continents, the latest discovery of a dinosaur’s bone has researchers re-evaluating other such theories.The researchers found the hip bone in Dinosaur Cove in Victoria state . That is about 220 kilometers (136 miles) southwest of Melbourne. It has been identified as the bone was that of a tyrannosaur that lived about 110 million years ago. Tyrannosaur is the ancestor of  Tyrannosaurus rex which roamed the earth about 40 million years before it. It’s a hypothesis that will need to be backed up by further research like other groups of scientists will have to independently verify the results.

This add fuel to the belief that Tyrannosaurs may have stalked far more of the globe than previously thought and have a global distribution.  The Australian Tyrannosaurus rex was about one-third of the size if we compare with the ferocious Tyrannosaurus rex of the famous Hollywood movie Jurassic Park, which lived about 70 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous period. On the other hand the discovered dinosaur is believed to have lived during the earlier Cretaceous period that is when South America, Antarctica, Africa and Australia had separated from the Northern continents but not from each other.

Roger Benson, a researcher at the University of Cambridge in the U.K. who led the study said the discovery also raises the question of why larger predators such as Tyrannosaurus rex evolved only in the Northern hemisphere. The findings promise to provide new insights into the evolutionary history of these dinosaurs

Reconstructing the dinosaur from the bone, measuring 30 centimeters (12 inches), the researchers say that it probably came from a dinosaur that was about 3 meters (10 feet) long and weighed 80 kilograms (176 pounds). Whereas Tyrannosaurus rex from northern continents grew to 12 meters and weighed 4 metric tons, or 4,000 kilograms.

It was easy for the scientist to declare that the dinosaur in question is a Tyrannosaurus as it has the features that are very distinctive of these dinosaurs, for instance, one end of the 12-inch-long bone (30-centimeter-long) is expanded and looks like a boot and the other end is flattened and connects to the hip, which is strongly characteristic of tyrannosaurs.

If tyrannosaur dinosaurs did inhabit the south, what happened to them?

According to a recent scientific investigation, it would appear that the skulls of dinosaurs in some species underwent massive transformation from when they were small offspring until they became adults. Proportionally speaking, like in most other animals, dinosaur babies had larger eyes and smaller faces than their parents did, but this ratio changed considerably as they progressed in age, experts now propose. In the new study, it was discovered that a species of large, plant-eating sauropods also showed the same alignment to the overall trend.

The new research was conducted on fossils recovered from Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Natural History. The remains have been there for a while, but until now no one paid too much attention to them. The researchers behind this study looked at the bones more closely and were thus able to determine that the skulls of baby dinosaurs differed considerably from their adult forms. The species that was analyzed is a type of plant-eating sauropod called Diplodocus. The research would seem to suggest that the skull of this species underwent large transformations as the animals got older and more mature.

In a statement he published this week, paleontologist John Whitlock, who is based at the University of Michigan, said that the discovery took so long to make simply because baby sauropod fossils are notoriously difficult to come by. Juvenile skulls are even rarer, and so he and his group were lucky to have had the chance to study one. Expert Jeffrey Wilson, who is also based at the University of Michigan, and Carnegie Museum scientist Matthew Lamanna, also participated in this study. A paper accompanying the findings has been published in the March issue of the respected scientific Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Unlike the vast majority of other sauropods, sauropods had long, square snouts, as opposed to the rounded and pointed ones of other giant dinosaurs. “Up until now, we assumed juveniles did too,” says Wilson. Although this skull is plainly that of a juvenile Diplodocus, in many ways it is quite different from those of the adults. What was unexpected was the shape of the snout – it appears to have been quite pointed, rather than square like the adults. This gives us a whole new perspective on what these animals may have looked like at different points in their lives,” Whitlock adds. The expert is also a doctoral candidate at the Museum of Paleontology.

We would like to know what’s your favorite dinosaur and why?

I have always wondered about large, theropod dinosaur’s arms. I have heard many descriptions and many explanations on how this large dinosaurs used these small arms. But I don’t know for sure what is the purpose of these small arms. Like anything else in nature animals have evolved different parts of their bodies for functional uses, but I just don’t see how an animal that large could ever use those arms.