ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Researchers at a top U.S. laboratory announced Tuesday that they have produced the highest resolution scan ever done of the inner workings of a fossilized tyrannosaur skull using neutron beams and high-energy X-rays, resulting in new clues that could help paleontologists piece together the evolutionary puzzle of the monstrous T. rex.
Officials with Los Alamos National Laboratory and the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science said they were able to peer deep into the skull of a “Bisti Beast,” a T. rex relative that lived millions of years ago in what is now northwestern New Mexico.
The images detail the dinosaur’s brain and sinus cavities, the pathways of some nerves and blood vessels and teeth that formed but never emerged.
Thomas Williamson, the museum’s curator of paleontology and part of the team that originally collected the specimen in the 1990s, said the scans are helping paleontologists figure out how the different species within the T. rex family relate to each other and how they evolved.
“We’re unveiling the internal anatomy of the skull so we’re going to see things that nobody has ever seen before,” he said during a news conference Tuesday.
T. rex and other tyrannosaurs were huge, dominant predators, but they evolved from much smaller ancestors.
The fossilized remnants of the Bisti Beast, or Bistahieversor sealeyi, were found in the Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness Area near Farmington, N.M. Dry, dusty badlands today, the area in the time of the tyrannosaur would have been a warmer, swampy environment with more trees.
The species lived about 10 million years before T. rex. Scientists have said it represents one of the early tyrannosaurs that had many of the advanced features — including big-headed, bone-crushing characteristics and small forelimbs — that were integral for the survival of T. rex.
Officials said the dinosaur’s skull is the largest object to date for which full, high-resolution neutron and X-ray CT scans have been done at Los Alamos.
The thickness of the skull, which spans 40 inches, required stronger X-rays than those typically available to penetrate the fossil. That’s where the lab’s electron and proton accelerators came in.
