Tyrannosaurus rex has newly discovered and scrawny relative. How a teen helped find it

Fossils found in 1998 by a high school junior are now believed to prove the infamous Tyrannosaurus rex had a very scrawny relative, according to a release from the Virginia Tech College of Science.

Fully grown, the small dinosaur stood 3 feet tall at the hip and about 9 feet long, which made it “only marginally longer than the just the skull of a fully grown Tyrannosaurus rex,” according to Virginia Tech’s Department of Geosciences.

By contrast, an average Tyrannosaurus rex was about 40 feet tall and weighed about nine tons and had “60 saw-edged, bone-crushing, pointed teeth,” according to the National Museum of History.

The newly named Suskityrannus hazelae dinosaur dates “back 92 million years to the Cretaceous Period,” and was found by Sterling Nesbitt, an assistant professor with Department of Geosciences, per Virginia Tech.

However, in what the university calls “a wild twist,” Nesbitt actually found the fossil evidence 20 years ago — at age 16 — and only recently figured out its importance, officials said.

The discovery was made when he was “a high school student participating in a dig expedition in New Mexico in 1998,” according to Virginia Tech. That expedition was led by Doug Wolfe, an author of the paper announcing the discovery and the leader of the Zuni Paleontological Project.

“Essentially, we didn’t know we had a cousin of Tyrannosaurus rex for many years,” Nesbitt said in a release from Virginia Tech.

At first, what they thought they had were the remains of something closer to a Velociraptor, Nesbitt explained, according to the release.

“Suskityrannus gives us a glimpse into the evolution of tyrannosaurs just before they take over the planet,” Nesbitt said in the release.

It’s believed the dinosaur he discovered was about three years old when it died and it, too, was a carnivore, scientists said in the release.

Only two partial skeletons of the dinosaur have been found since 1997, and Nesbitt’s discovery — made when he was a high school junior — is considered a “more complete specimen,” officials said in the press release.

“From 1998 until 2006, the fossils remain stored at the Arizona Museum of Natural History in Mesa, Arizona. After 2006, Nesbitt brought the fossils with him through various postings as student and researcher in New York, Texas, Illinois, and now Blacksburg,” according to the release.

This story was originally published May 6, 2019 at 12:46 PM.