If the T-rex was the king of the dinosaurs, then this little fellow was the runt.

The newly discovered meat hunter - who roamed the Earth tens of millions of years before Tyrannosaurus rex - is a perfect, miniature copy of its more famous and fearsome relative, except for the possible addition of a feathery mane.

But despite having the same oversized skull, puny forearms and powerful jaws as the T-rex, the creature - nicknamed 'tiny-saurus' - was just one hundredth the size.

The discovery of the 9ft long 'mini-me' has astonished fossil hunters. They now believe that the ancestors of the T-rex evolved its famous body shape while it was still not much bigger than a man, and then grew into a giant over the next few million years.

The fossilised remains of Raptorex kriegsteini were found in China. Palaeontologist Prof Paul Sereno said tyrannosaur design evolved at 'punk size'.

'And that is pretty staggering because there is no other example that I can think of where an animal has been so finely designed at about 100th the size that it would eventually become,' he said.

Raptorex chased prey and roamed the lakeside forests of northern China around 125 million years ago. It bore all the hallmark features of the T-rex - including a large head compared to its body and long feet suited for running.

Its brain had enlarged 'olfactory bulbs' - areas that handle smells - which suggested it had a highly developed sense of smell that would have been vital for hunting, the researchers report today in the journal Science.

Prof Sereno, of Chicago University, said: 'It's really stolen from tyrannosaurids all the fire of the group.' All that Raptorex left for its descendants was 'a suite of detailed features largely related to getting bigger'.

It led to the domination of T-rex - the greatest predator ever to stalk the Earth - for 90million years until a comet or asteroid probably finished off the dinosaurs for good 25million years later.

The nearly complete skeleton was brought to Chicago by private fossil collector Henry Kriegstein. He bought it from a fossil dealer .

The bones - which included the skull, teeth, nose, spine, shoulders, forearms, hind legs and pelvis - belonged to a young adult who died aged five or six.

Prof Sereno said: "First, we used the best mechanical preparation of the specimen possible, which entails the finest needles and air abrasives under a microscope."

Then we made moulds and casts of the cranial bones, assembled a cast skull, and sent that skull through a CT scanner at the University of Chicago hospital to get the snout cross-section.

"'We used silicone on the skull roof to cast the forebrain of R. kriegsteini. Finally, I made a thin-section from one femur, or thigh bone, for microscopic examination, and determined that the individual had lived to be five or six years old."

The first full size T-rex appeared around 90million years ago - and dominated North America and Asia until dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous.

The giants were up to 43ft long, around 13ft tall at its hips, walked on two legs, and weighed more than seven tons. Fossil hunters have uncovered more than 30 skeletons of T-rex.

After Prof Sereno and his colleagues have finished their study of Raptorex, it will be returned to a museum in Inner Mongolia, the place where the fossil was illicitly excavated.

Sumber : The Daily Mail