Baby tyrannosaurs were absolutely adorable, study finds – BGR

• Tyrannosaurs are the most iconic of all dinosaurs, but what they were like as babies has been a matter of debate and mystery.
• New research on rare tyrannosaur embryos offers researchers a first good look at what the huge carnivores looked like fresh from their eggs.
• When the dinosaurs came out, they were about the size of a medium-sized dog.

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If you jump into a time machine and travel backwards for millions of years, you might come face to face with an adult Tyrannosaurus. Well, it would probably be more like face-to-knee as the dinosaurs can reach huge sizes, but I digress. The main thing here is that you would be scared and get eaten or run away.

However, if you come across a juvenile tyrannosaur, you may be more inclined to pet his head than run for your life, as new research reveals that baby tyrannosaurs were about the size of a medium-sized dog. The find is thanks to the discovery of fossilized tyrannosaur embryos that give scientists a glimpse of how big the creatures were when they first emerged from their shells.

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As CNN reports, the study, which was published in the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences, is largely based on a jaw bone from a tyrannosaurus embryo. Because so many tyrannosaur fossils have been discovered over the years, often only one bone is needed before researchers can determine the animal’s overall size. In this case, the baby dinosaur was about three feet long.

That’s a small version of a creature that can grow over 30 feet (9 meters) as an adult, but one meter is still quite big when it comes to baby animals. These dinosaurs came from eggs, and the researchers estimated that the egg containing the dinosaur used for this study would have been about 17 centimeters long on its own. That’s a large omelette.

A baby predator is still a predator, of course, so while a little tyrannosaur was probably cute, it could probably do some damage anyway. The creatures were born with all the tools they needed to secure their own food, with tongue-tied teeth that would cause a painful or even fatal bite to small prey. But as the debate about whether tyrannosaurs were primarily hunters or scavengers rages on, it’s worth considering

Discovering the size of a baby tyrannosaurus is really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to understanding what the creatures looked like as juveniles. Scientists have learned a lot about the rearing habits (and sometimes the lack thereof) of many different dinosaurs, but there is a particular interest in how tyrannosaurs raised their young. Perhaps some more of those questions will be answered in the coming years.