The tiny Tyrannosaurus rex dinosaur cousin that humans could look down on

History’s most frightening dinosaur, the Tyrannosaurus rex, came from a long line of pipsqueaks.

Scientists have identified a new cousin of the T. rex as a dinosaur that only reached the 3-foot (91cm) height of a toddler. If it stretched its duck-billed head up, an adult human maybe “would be looking at it in the eye”. said Sterling Nesbitt, a palaeontologist at Virginia Tech, who discovered the dinosaur.

Nesbitt found a set of its bones in 1998 when he was 16, while serving as a volunteer on a dig in New Mexico with a famed palaeontologist. But for about two decades, scientists weren’t certain what it was, until other small cousins of T. rex were discovered.

“The small group of tyrannosauroid dinosaurs would give rise to some of the biggest predators that we’ve ever seen,” said Nesbitt, lead author of a study in Monday’s journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.

The new dinosaur is called Suskityrannus hazelae, named after the Zuni word for coyote. It dates back 92 million years, about 20 million years before the T. rex stomped the Earth.

The newly discovered cousin – which was three times longer than it was tall – weighed between 45 and 90 pounds, almost nothing compared to the nine-ton king of the dinosaurs.