Last year I made a city holiday at Warsaw and took the opportunity to visit a lot of museums there. I was especially eager to see the Museum of Evolution, which is located in the monumental Palace of Culture and Science. One of the exhibition rooms has a whole gang of Tarbosaurs on display, including some famous specimens. Tarbosaurus gets much lesser attention than Tyrannosaurus, so I thought this would be a good chance to post some photos of the skeletons at Warsaw.
That´s likely the most famous one:
The information table next the the left skeleton is around 1,8 m in height, so this specimen was only a subadult with a hip height of not much over 2 m in life, with a total length of somewhat over 4 m or so.
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Tarbosaurus and Tyrannosaurus seem really quite similar at first look, but if you look at the proportions of their skulls, you can see that the one of T-rex was significiantly more massive and especially also much broader.
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A photo which shows how the specimens was excavated:
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There is also a cast of a complete skeleton of a pretty big specimen, which easily dwarves the other skeletons nearby.
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It was not easy to get them all completely on a photo, but it gives you an idea about the massive size difference.
There was also a cast of another skull and some isolated bones as well:
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And last but not least some old paleoart:
Ich würde zu gern wissen woher die den Skleralring haben 😀
Ja, das habe ich mich auch gefragt.
What does the information table say about the realtionship between Tarbosaurus and Tyrannosaurus? Recent finds of Daspletosaurus seem to close the gap between the more basal Tyrannosaurids with lower skulls and members of Tyrannosaurinae with deep skulls. But as Daspletosaurus is only known from North America, this does not help much where Tarbosaurus comes from. Would a parallel evolution in Asia and North America or faunal exchange more likely?
One more thought about yout photo of a Tarbosaurus skull from below. In my recent studies of theropods I found pictures in dorsal view extremely useful for comparisons. Especially the massive body of Tyrannoaurus vs. the more slender Tarbosaurus or Giganotosaurus I have never seen more clearly. Providing that perspective seems to get more common in pblications, but not elsewhere. Have you ever seen any examples for this in museums?
I don´t think there was much more information about the relationships, and museum displays are usually not the most up-to-date sources for such information.