Eotyrannus is a theropod dinosaur from the Early Cretaceous of the United Kingdom. It was named in 2001 by Stephen Hutt and his associates. It is considered to an intermediate between earlier and later tyrannosauroids, and its discovery has helped us gain a better understanding of the superfamily's evolutionary history as a whole.
Physiology[]
Eotyrannus was a theropod with a slender body, a long tail, long arms with three fingers on each hand, a moderately long neck, and a small head with a mouth containing lots of big teeth. Most of its body (excluding some of its legs and all of its snout) would have been covered in short, fuzz-like feathers.
Diet[]
Eotyrannus was a predator, preying on small ornithopods, small mammals, small pterosaurs, and smaller theropods. Its teeth had knife-like serrations from front to back, and were used to cut into the hides of large prey.
Ecology[]
The discovery of Eotyrannus tells us a little about how tyrannosauroids evolved. By itself, it is another piece of evidence that earlier tyrannosauroids were small, slender animals with long limbs and three-fingered hands used for grasping; with 2 other tyrannosauroids found from the United Kingdom having existed during the Late Jurassic, there is now a hypothesis that tyrannosauroids originated from Eurasia, with East Asia having been more important during their early evolutionary history than Europe due to the appearance of genera such as Guanlong. That said, Eotyrannus stands out among earlier tyrannosauroids in regards to its cranial (skull) morphology; its snout was not as elongated as other early tyrannosauroids, instead being more robust in build (and thus optimized for stronger bites) like that of Yutyrannus. Since many of these thick-snouted early tyrannosauroids are not very closely related to each other, it is possible that this was an adaptation that evolved separately in multiple tyrannosauroid genera across the history of the superfamily's existence instead of being a primitive trait.[1]
References[]
- Naish, D., & Cau, A. (2022). The osteology and affinities of Eotyrannus lengi, a tyrannosauroid theropod from the Wealden Supergroup of southern England. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.12727