With Australian researchers’ discovery of a hip bone of a tyrannosaur - which walked the Earth nearly 110 million years back; almost 40 million years before T. rex – in the south of the country, there is now evidence that the tyrannosaurs lived in the continents of the Southern Hemisphere too.

The tyrannosaur’s 30-centimeter-long hip bone has been uncovered from Dinosaur Cove in the state of Victoria, almost 220 kilometers southwest of Melbourne. It supposedly belonged to a 3-meter-long dinosaur who weighed around 80 kg.

The 1989-discovered bone was identified as belonging to a tyrannosaur in October last year, after it was taken to London’s Natural History Museum, by Tom Rich, a paleontologist at Museum Victoria in Melbourne.

Commenting on the most recent evidence, lead researcher Roger Benson, of the University of Cambridge in the UK, said that the discovery refutes the earlier theory that tyrannosaurs never stalked the Southern continents; as well as raises the issue of why the evolution of larger predators, like T. rex., was restricted to the Northern hemisphere alone.

Noting that “the bone is unambiguously identifiable as a tyrannosaur because these dinosaurs have very distinctive hip bones,” Benson said in a statement: “This find has major significance for our knowledge of how this group of dinosaurs evolved. Tyrannosaur fossils had only ever been found in the northern hemisphere before.”