Paleontologists announced that they found the heaviest and oldest Tyrannosaurus rex ever known. It’s a dinosaur named Scotty, whose remains were found in the Saskatchewan province of Canada in the 1990s. Scientist claim that Scotty lived around 66 million years ago and probably weighed about 9.8 tons.
“This is the rarest of rare dinosaurs,” said Gregory Erickson, a paleobiologist from Florida State University who was one of the study’s authors. “We have a full, grown adult.”
The dinosaur measures roughly 42 feet long which is described as “unusually long” by the study leader Scott Persons, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Alberta. Scotty’s remains show that he endured injures that led to broken and healed rib, infected jaw and broken tailbones.
Scotty is one of 20 T rex fossils ever found, but there’s still much more to learn about this extinct species. Paleontologists suspect that dinosaurs were probably a lot bigger and older than we originally thought.
“It would not surprise me that those animals turn out to increase the range of body size—potentially to overlap or even surpass what we know from T. rex,” study leader Scott Persons told NG.
