Moros Intrepidus - the mini T-Rex to appear in Jurassic World: Dominion 2022

Tyrannosaurus Rex may have been the "tyrant lizard king" but before the T-Rex became titanic and ferocious to dominate what is now North America, their ancestors weren't really of the elite race: they were small, gangly, agile, adapted to a crouching lifestyle under the shadow of much larger carnivores. Those are the Moros Intrepidus.

@ Moros Intrepidus.

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The gang predator fills an important gap in our understanding of how Tyrannosaurs evolved and dominated during the Cretaceous.

Moros weighs only about 77 kilograms (170 pounds) and is about 1.6 meters (5 feet) tall, about the size of an average human. They are one of the smallest dinosaurs of their kind dating from the Cretaceous period, between 66 million and 145 million years ago. They are a miniature version of the T-Rex, but with a distinctive feature that their limbs are quite slender.

A fossil of Moros discovered in Utah dating back to 96 million years ago, it is also the oldest Cretaceous Tyrannosaur skeleton found in this area, pushing back its date by 15 million years. Roughly speaking, they are the ancestors of the giant T-Rex that we are familiar with on Jurassic Park/World movies.

Moros is an important link in understanding the evolution of the T-Rex. They lived in the golden age of the largest carnivore of their time, the Allosaurus. And as the Allosaurus began to die out, Moros gradually evolved over tens of millions of years to increase its size by 100 times, shifting from a herd/gang lifestyle to a largely solitary lifestyle.

Furthermore, Moros closely resembles the Tyrannosaur that lived in Asia in the early Cretaceous. It's discovered and widely-accepted that the ancestors of Moros traveled across a land bridge from Asia to North America, as part of a dinosaur species exchange between the two continents.

In honor of Moros' great journey, researchers gave Moros the suffix "Intrepidus" for their being dauntless transcontinental travelers.

In a teaser image by Colin Trevorrow, Moros shall appear in Jurassic World: Dominion to be released on June 10th 2022 by Universal Pictures.