Benson, R.B.J., P.M. Barrett, T.H. Rich, & P. Vickers-Rich. 2010. A southern tyrant reptile. Science 327: 1613 DOI: 10.1126/science.118745

The 100-million-year tyrannosauroid lineage is poorly documented. Its youngest representatives, the deep-skulled, multiton tyrannosaurids, were the apex predators of latest Cretaceous Laurasia. These are known from abundant, well-preserved fossils. Until recently, however, almost nothing was known about the ecology and biogeography of earlier tyrannosauroids. This situation is changing. Asurge of newdiscoveries is revealing diverse ecotypes and body sizes from as early as the Middle to Late Jurassic. Despite this, the record of tyrannosauroid evolutionary history has been limited to the northern continents, an aberrant pattern given the broad distributions of other long-lived dinosaur clades. Here we report an Australian tyrannosauroid, represented by a pubis from the late Early Cretaceous of Victoria [National Museum of Victoria (NMV) P186046]. The pubis is almost identical to those of tyrannosaurids. Several distinctive synapomorphies indicate tyrannosauroid affinities.

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