An anonymous reader writes "A new press release about Tyrannosaurus Rex shows that they lived fast and died young. Growing at 2kg per day for up to 10 years. Links to summaries on BBC and CNN."
Re:Doesn't that seem a bit high?
by
Ayaress
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
There have been a lot of people who believe that T.rex was a scavenger for a variety of reasons. They're clearly able to kill by sheer size, but I find it reasonable that that wasn't their main survival strategy.
A sparsely populated scavenger, particularly one that could still kill smaller prey (of course, by "small" in this case I'm still talking about things the size of a Buick) would have a much easier job eating that much.
Also, remember that the animal's their eating (wether scavenged or hunted) were as large, and in some cases much larger, than they were. A dead sauropod could likely feed several T.rex for some time after the kill, in the same way that a wolf pack can spend several days eating a large moose.
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There have been a lot of people who believe that T.rex was a scavenger for a variety of reasons. They're clearly able to kill by sheer size, but I find it reasonable that that wasn't their main survival strategy.
A sparsely populated scavenger, particularly one that could still kill smaller prey (of course, by "small" in this case I'm still talking about things the size of a Buick) would have a much easier job eating that much.
Also, remember that the animal's their eating (wether scavenged or hunted) were as large, and in some cases much larger, than they were. A dead sauropod could likely feed several T.rex for some time after the kill, in the same way that a wolf pack can spend several days eating a large moose.