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A private owner has donated a fossil that could change the way we think about Tyrannosaurus and their development.
Some scientists believed the T.Rex evolved to its enormous size, then its arms shrank, when they were no longer needed. The new discovery, though, shows that the tiny-armed killing machine may have evolved from a much smaller killing-machine-with-tiny-arms. This totally rearranges the previous T.Rex evolution paradigm.
The 125 million-year-old fossil dinosaur, unearthed in China and dubbed Raptorex kriegsteini, is “as close to the proverbial missing link on a lineage as we might ever get for tyrannosaurs,” Sereno said.
(As a special bonus, check out the religious debate in the comments.)
From the Upcoming 
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Paleontologist Jorn Hurum lead a team of scientists to analyze a 47-million-year-old fossil above (named "Ida") and came up with this intriguing conclusion: it is a critical missing-link species in the evolution of primates!
The fossil, he says, bridges the evolutionary split between higher primates such as monkeys, apes, and humans and their more distant relatives such as lemurs.
"This is the first link to all humans," Hurum, of the Natural History Museum in Oslo, Norway, said in a statement. Ida represents "the closest thing we can get to a direct ancestor."
Ida, properly known as Darwinius masillae, has a unique anatomy. The lemur-like skeleton features primate-like characteristics, including grasping hands, opposable thumbs, clawless digits with nails, and relatively short limbs.
"This specimen looks like a really early fossil monkey that belongs to the group that includes us," said Brian Richmond, a biological anthropologist at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., who was not involved in the study.
Link | Ida’s official website – Thanks Marilyn!
