Paleontologists have discovered a new species of long-snouted tyrannosaur – scientifically named Qianzhousaurus sinensis and nicknamed Pinocchio rex – that lived in Asia during Cretaceous, about 66 million years ago.

Qianzhousaurus sinensis belonged to the same family as Tyrannosaurus rex – Tyrannosauridae.

Although the dinosaur lived alongside deep-snouted tyrannosaurs, it would not have been in direct competition with them, as they probably hunted different prey.

According to the scientists, Qianzhousaurus sinensis measured about 9 m from snout to tail, and had an elongated skull, long teeth compared with the deeper, more powerful jaws and thick teeth of a conventional Tyrannosaurus.

“This is a different breed of tyrannosaur,” said Dr Steve Brusatte from the University of Edinburgh’s School of GeoSciences, a co-author of the paper published in the journal Nature Communications.

“It has the familiar toothy grin of Tyrannosaurus 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.”

A near complete skull fossil of Qianzhousaurus sinensis was unearthed at the 72-66 million-year-old site in Ganzhou, southern China.

“The new discovery is very important. Along with Alioramus from Mongolia, it shows that the long-snouted tyrannosaurids were widely distributed in Asia. Although we are only starting to learn about them, the long-snouted tyrannosaurs were apparently one of the main groups of predatory dinosaurs in Asia,” said lead author Prof Junchang Lü from the Institute of Geology, Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences, China.

Following the discovery, the paleontologists have created a new branch of the tyrannosaur family for specimens with very long snouts, and they expect more dinosaurs to be added to the group as excavations in Asia continue to identify new species.

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Junchang Lü et al. 2014. A new clade of Asian Late Cretaceous long-snouted tyrannosaurids. Nature Communications 5, article number: 3788; doi: 10.1038/ncomms4788