Tyrannosaurus rex is the greatest celebrity of all time. The 68–66 million-year-old carnivore is far older than any actor or musician, including Keith Richards, and yet is still must-have talent for Hollywood blockbusters, comics, museum displays and more. But all that fame comes at a cost. There seems to be as much mythology as science surrounding the ‘tyrant lizard king’. The paleontologist David Hone seeks to slice through fiction and chew over fact in his new book The Tyrannosaur Chronicles.
From the title, you can be forgiven for thinking that this is the journal of an angsty T. rex. Rather, Hone has written a handbook to almost everything you’d want to know about the celebrated dinosaur and its various kin. Early on, he points out that when he wrote the book there were 29 recognised tyrannosaur species spanning about 165 million years — with the recently named timurlengia bringing the total to an even 30. T. rex and other late Cretaceous giants get all the love, but the very first tyrants didn’t really deserve the title at all: they were small saurians no more than two metres long, with long arms, thin snouts, and covered in downy fuzz. Tyrannosaurs stayed this way for tens of millions of years, only becoming Jurassic Park’s giants in the last 20 million years of their reign.
All of these additional tyrants get some space — creatures such as lythronax, nanuqsaurus and oianzhousaurus so new that they’ll likely be unfamiliar to most readers — but even they are overshadowed by the mighty T. rex. As Hone himself acknowledges, that’s because T. rex is undoubtedly the most studied prehistoric creature of all time: there’s simply more to say about it because more research has been conducted on it.
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