Name:
Habitat:
Historical Period:
Size and Weight:
Diet:
Distinguishing Characteristics:
About Gorgosaurus:
In many ways, Gorgosaurus was your garden-variety tyrannosaur--not quite as big (or as famous) as Tyrannosaurus Rex, but every bit as dangerous from the point of view of smaller, herbivorous dinosaurs. What really sets Gorgosaurus apart among paleontologists is that it left an unusually large number of well-preserved bones, making it the best-represented tyrannosaur in the fossil record.
Gorgosaurus is thought to have occupied the same North American territory as another fairly generic tyrannosaur, Daspletosaurus--and some experts think it might really have been a species of yet another genus of tyrannosaur, Albertosaurus.
An interesting analysis of the growth patterns of Gorgosaurus concludes that this tyrannosaur had an unusually long "juvenile" phase, after which it sprouted suddenly (in the course of two or three years) into its full adult size. This implies that juvenile and full-grown tyrannosaurs inhabited different ecological niches during the late Cretaceous period, and probably subsisted on different prey as well.
