Tyrannosauridae

Skeletal reconstruction of "Stan" (BHI 3033) in the Manchester Museum

• North America
• Asia

The Tyrannosauridae family includes some of the largest known carnivorous creatures.

Typical for this family were the very small arms with only two fingers. In their physique same tyrannosaurids, although they are attributable to Coelurosauriern according to current knowledge, the members of the group Carnosauria: Large skull, massive body and heavier, muscular tail.

Fossil finds of Tyrannosauridae originate, inter alia from the Late Cretaceous of North America and Asia. The known genera differ in body size: While Alioramus was five to six feet long, Albertosaurus, Daspletosaurus and Gorgosaurus reached a length between eight and ten meters. Tarbosaurus and Tyrannosaurus even came to body lengths of about 12 m and are thus involved in the biggest robbery dinosaurs at all.

The evolution of the tyrannosaur

In the last five years a number of early relative of tyrannosaurids were found, demonstrating that the group not only broke away late in the Cretaceous period, but at the end of the Jura from basal representatives of Coelurosaurier emerged. These new finds are Aviatyrannis Jurassica from Portugal, Eotyrannus Lengi from England, and Dilong paradoxus and guanlong wucaii from China. All of these predators were relatively small with 3 to 6 meters in length, had a flat skull and were probably very agile. They had three fingers per hand and in two genera plumage was detected. It is one of these early tyrannosaur together with the family Tyrannosauridae to the superfamily Tyrannosauroidea.

To the family Tyrannosauridae included:

• Subfamily Albertosaurinae Albertosaurus (Alberta, Canada)
• Gorgosaurus (western USA)

• ? Alioramus (Mongolia)
• Daspletosaurus (western USA)
• Lythronax (western North America )
• Nanotyrannus (western USA)
• Nanuqsaurus (Alaska)
• Tarbosaurus (Mongolia)
• Teratophoneus (western USA)
• Tyrannosaurus (western USA)
• Zhuchengtyrannus (China)