Tyrannosaurus rex towered over many other dinosaurs. But the biggest of the king of the dinos may have been even heftier than fossils hint.
Only around 80 fossil T. rex skeletons have been found so far, and not all of them are complete. “We know that there must have been millions and billions of T. rex on Earth,” says Jordan Mallon. This paleontologist works at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa. It’s unlikely that the biggest T. rex ever is among those 80 skeletons. A group of 80 people picked at random probably wouldn’t include the tallest person on Earth.
To calculate the potential size of the biggest T. rex, Mallon teamed up with David Hone. He’s a paleontologist at Queen Mary University in London, England.
Scientists have estimated that some 2.5 billion T. rex may have once roamed Earth. But not all would have made it to adulthood. “Most of them didn’t,” Mallon says. “They were picked off by other predators. Or they died of disease. Or they got trampled by a Triceratops.” To calculate the spread of sizes across a large group, Mallon’s team used a computer model. The computer couldn’t handle 2.5 billion dinos, so the pair went with 140 million.
The researchers based the spread of ages for the 140 million T. rex on alligators — living relatives of T. rex. They used mathematical tools called statistics. Statistics can use known information from a small group — such as the 80 fossils — to calculate trends for a much larger group.
Based on an animal’s bones, scientists can figure out its rough age and weight. Using this information from reports on fossils, Mallon and Hone worked out how T. rex body mass increased with age. But just like other animals, not all dinos of the same age are the same size. The researchers reasoned that the variation in sizes among T. rex individuals may have resembled that of alligators. Alligators are one of the largest reptiles alive today, and they’re meat eaters like T….
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