Unearthed dinosaur 'missing link' to T-Rex family

LONDON -- A previously unknown relative of Tyrannosaurus rex has been unearthed in Britain, adding a limb to the family tree of the fearsome predator, scientists said Wednesday.\nEotyrannus lengi, named after collector Gavin Leng who found the first bone on the Isle of Wight, was a 15-foot-long carnivore that lived 120 to 125 million years ago.\nPaleontologists described the discovery as one of the most important archaeological finds made in Britain.\nMartin Munt, acting curator of the Museum of Isle of Wight Geology which is coordinating the dig, said the Eotyrannus -- "early tyrant" -- was an important piece in the evolutionary jigsaw of T-rex.\n"The remains start to fill in the family tree of life. They are a missing link. The T-rex was around 60 to 70 million years ago. At that time this skeleton was already 55 million years old," Munt said in a telephone interview.\n"We are really pushing back to the origins of the group of dinosaurs that gave us T-rex."\nThe first bones were found in 1997 on a cliff top near the village of Brighstone, near Newport, and the name "lengi" honors Leng, who found the first bone. It has taken four years to excavate the site more fully and to analyze the findings.\nDarren Naish of the University of Portsmouth, who is part of a five-member team examining the remains, said 40 percent of the skeleton had been discovered. He said that was enough to determine it was an entirely new species.\n"Eotyrannus lengi is one of the most complete and most globally important predatory dinosaurs of this age that has been found. It gives us a lot of information about the early evolution of the tyrannosaur that we did not know before," Naish said.\n"It also gives us a lot of information about the diversity of dinosaurs at this time in Europe."\nThe later tyrannosaurs, including T-rex, stalked North America and Asia in the late Cretaceous period, about 65 million years ago. They were 38-feet-long, had huge heads with powerful jaws and tiny forearms and relied on teeth alone to kill their prey.\nAlthough much smaller, the Eotyrannus had a similar skull, shoulder and limb structure. It would have been a fast, agile predator, preying mainly on species such as Valdosaurus and Hypsilophodon, also found on the Isle of Wight.\nNaish said the new species may also be closely related to the Velociraptor, a 6-foot-long predator of the mid-Cretaceous period, around 90 million years ago, which was made famous by the movie "Jurassic Park."\nHe said it's small head, long powerful arms and sharp claws were very similar to those of Eotyrannus.\n"People who work on theropod dinosaurs are pretty encouraged -- it is the early proto-tyrannosaur that we were looking for," Naish added.\n"Our dinosaur has a bigger head than Velociraptor, though it is nothing like the size of T-rex.... They may all be descended from a small predatory dinosaur very similar to the Velociraptor from the Jurassic period."\nGregory Erickson, a paleontologist at Florida State University said the find was "very exciting"