No kidding, T. rex's Chinese cousin Pinocchio rex packed a big bite

Its nickname may sound funny - Pinocchio rex - but it probably would not have been wise to laugh at this strange, long-snouted cousin of the famous meat-eating dinosaur T. rex: it could easily have eaten you alive.

Scientists said they had identified a new member of Tyrannosaurus rex's family, a beast named Qianzhousaurus sinensis that was up to nine metres long and stalked China at the very end of the age of dinosaurs.

It differs in some significant ways from other tyrannosaurs, especially with a skull far more elongated than that of T. rex.

"It's a new breed of tyrannosaur, with a long snout and lots of horns on its skull, very different from the short-snouted, robust, muscular skulls of T. rex. So it tells us that tyrannosaurs were more ecologically variable than we previously thought," said palaeontologist Steve Brusatte of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, one of the researchers.

Its elongated snout prompted researchers to nickname it Pinocchio rex, inspired by the wooden puppet who dreamed of being a real boy but whose nose grew when he told a lie. "The long snout made us think of Pinocchio and his long nose, so Pinocchio rex seemed like a cheeky nickname," Brusatte said.

Two other tyrannosaur fossils with long snouts have been found previously in Mongolia but both were juveniles. It had been unclear whether the long snout was just a juvenile feature.