It’s big. It’s scary. It’s the ‘Pinocchio Rex.’

In the future, maybe we'll find more in this family and call them Cinderella Rex, Jiminy Rex, Captain-Hook Rex, etc.

WP article here

An artist’s rendering of two Pinocchio rex hunting. (Chuang Zhao)

For years, scientists had thought it was out there — an ancient predator with a beak-like snout. Fossils of two Tyrannosaurus rex with elongated heads had surfaced in Mongolia, but they were just juveniles. No one knew whether they represented a new species of dinosaur, or were just a pair of T. rex that had died during an awkward teen phase.

On Wednesday, Nature Communications published an article that claimed to put doubts to rest. According to scientists who analyzed remains discovered near Ganzhou, a city in southern China, another species of tyrannosaur once hulked across the planet. The remarkably-preserved specimen, twice the size of Mongolia’s juvenile dinosaurs, shows that this subspecies was fearsome, with a mouth full of long, narrow teeth. Prowling across Asia 66 million years ago, it had an elongated skull and thick, powerful jaws — though not quite as powerful as the better-known T. rex.
The name: “Pinocchio rex.”

“This is a different breed of tyrannosaur,” said the article’s co-author, Steve Brusatte of the University of Edinburgh. “It has the familiar toothy grin of T. rex, but its snout was much longer and it had a row of horns on its nose. It might have looked a little comical, but it would have been as deadly as any other tyrannosaur, and maybe even a little faster and stealthier.” P. rex was smaller than T. rex. It likely weighed around one ton, and was about 30 feet in length, Brusatte told The Washington Post in a phone interview. “It’s no little runt,” he said. “It would have been bad news to run into it.”

Formerly known as Qianzhousaurus sinensis, P. rex lived alongside the fabled T. rex, a beast that dominates dinosaur pop culture. It appears the creatures lived together in peace, scientists say, and didn’t hunt the same prey, coexisting much in the same way cheetahs and lions do in the savanna. “Both were predators,” Brusatte said, “but they were slightly different predators. … We’re learning more and more about Asian dinosaurs, and here you have two Tyrannosauruses filling the top predator roles on the first and second tiers.”