chronological range of the genus Albertosaurus. Other experts maintain the two genera as separate. Canadian paleontologist Phil Currie claims there are as many anatomical differences between Albertosaurus and Gorgosaurus as there are between Daspletosaurus and Tyrannosaurus, which are almost always kept separate. He also notes that undescribed tyrannosaurids discovered in Alaska, New Mexico and elsewhere in North America may help clarify the situation. Gregory S. Paul has suggested that Gorgosaurus libratus is ancestral to Albertosaurus sarcophagus. Below is the cladogram of Tyrannosauridae based on the phylogenetic analysis conducted by Loewen et al. in 2013. Paleobiology Life history Gregory Erickson and colleagues have studied the growth and life history of tyrannosaurids using bone histology, which can determine the age of a specimen when it died. A growth curve can be developed when the ages of various individuals are plotted against their sizes on a graph. Tyrannosaurids grew throughout their lives, but underwent tremendous growth spurts for about four years, after an extended juvenile phase. Sexual maturity may have ended this rapid growth phase, after which growth slowed down considerably in adult animals. Examining five Gorgosaurus specimens of various sizes, Erickson calculated a maximum growth rate of about per year during the rapid growth phase, slower than in tyrannosaurines like Daspletosaurus and Tyrannosaurus, but comparable to Albertosaurus. Gorgosaurus spent as much as half its life in the juvenile phase before ballooning up to near-maximum size in only a few years. This, along with the complete lack of predators intermediate in size between huge adult tyrannosaurids and other small theropods, suggests that these niches may have been filled by juvenile tyrannosaurids. This pattern is seen in modern Komodo dragons, whose hatchlings start off as tree-dwelling insectivores and slowly mature into massive apex predators capable of taking down large vertebrates. Other tyrannosaurids, including Albertosaurus, have been found in aggregations that some have suggested to represent mixed-age packs, but there is no evidence of gregarious behavior in Gorgosaurus. The discovery of two exceptionally preserved juvenile skulls from Gorgosaurus suggests that Gorgosaurus underwent the morphological shift from gracile juveniles to robust adults at an earlier age than Tyrannosaurus, to which it was compared in a study published by Jared Voris et al., suggests that the ontogenetic changes occurred at roughly 5-7 years of age in Gorgosaurus; much earlier than its larger and later relative. However, both tyrannosaur genera underwent these ontogenetic transformations at a similar percent