Studying changes in proteins can actually give us more insights about evolution than just looking at the DNA. Proteins can yield clues about the age of a sample or about the environment in which an animal lived or was buried. Schweitzer All seriousness aside, I think the next 10 years are going to be very interesting in the world of dinosaurs. At least there is a sense of hope, a glimmer of light, that promises to answer many many more questions about dinosaurs. T. rex juveniles are extremely rare in the fossil record. Some scientists suggest this is because many juveniles survived to adulthood, but it could also be due to a fossil hunters’ bias, to seek out and find big specimens. There’s also the possibility that scientists have simply been misidentifying another related, much smaller species of tyrannosaur, called Nanotyrannus lancensis, that might instead represent T. rex juveniles. Nanotyrannus frequently pops up in the same fossil beds as T. rex, however, a 2010 study examining the skull of a hallmark Nanotyrannus specimen found distinct differences in the sinus and brain casing features. Only further fossil finds will confirm whether Nanotyrannus is a baby T. rex or a distinct species.

The Yutyrannus, described in 2012, are the largest known dinosaurs with feathers—a patch of fossilized skin shows shaggy body feathers, similar to an Emu. Yutyrannus was related to T. rex and measured 30 feet long and weighed more than 3,000 pounds.” Illustration by Brian Choo. Horner is actually the real person whom Dr. Alan Grant’s character is based on! He found a fossilized T. rex femur in 2003 in Montana. It was big. So big that it didn’t fit into the helicopter.In June of last year, the Smithsonian reached an agreement with the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the skeleton is on loan to the Smithsonian for the next 50 years. At 80 to 85 percent of a full T. rex skeleton, the Wankel T. rex is among the most complete fossils of its kind unearthed, second only to the Chicago Field Museum’s “Sue,” which the Smithsonian tried to acquire in 1997. Beyond these stunning skeletal displays, paleontologists have found some 50 T. rex specimens, since Henry Fairfield Osborn first described the species in 1905.

The 2nd evidence is feathers. Over the years you may have noticed that there have been more and more pictures of dinosaurs with feathers. Our traditional ideas about what Velociraptors, or even the T-Rex, looked like are now shifting from reptile-like to bird-like. Oh, I just thought of something. If that is true, then it also answers a few age-old questions. Like:Dino bones look like bird bones. Just by simply looking at the bones we have today you can easily see that they look more like birds than any other animal. This, is actually, the first thing that led researchers to come to believe that dinosaurs were closely related to birds.