Theropoda
“Bloody Mary” · NCSM 40000
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Nanotyrannus lancensis was a medium-sized, gracile eutyrannosaur from the Late Cretaceous of North America. Based on NCSM 40000 (restored here), it appears N. lancensis grew close to 6.5 m (21 feet) long. Still a big predator by modern standards, but quite a bit smaller than the large Tyrannosaurus individuals it shared its environment with.
As you can read in more depth on the genus hub page, Nanotyrannus was originally based on a less-than-ideally preserved skull and jaws, and has been the subject of decades of debate over whether these smaller tyrannosaur specimens were juvenile T. rex, or whether a second, smaller predator lived alongside it.
That question was definitively answered with the Bloody Mary specimen (NCSM 40000), as an examination of tissue growth patterns in the femur (thigh bone) show it was an adult, despite being around half the length of a fully-grown T. rex. Other differences from T. rex included the larger hands of Nanotyrannu_s_, and several features of the skull.
