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T-Rex Bigger and Hungrier Than Previously Thought
gpronger writes "Researchers John Hutchinson (Royal Veterinary College in London) and Peter Makovicky (Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago) built digital models of a T-Rex and then added flesh using the structure of soft tissues in birds and crocodiles as a guide. This allowed them to project body mass. By doing this for a number of specimens of different age and size, they could also evaluate growth. At maximum, the adolescents could add 11 pounds in weight in a single day. The adult was found to be 30% heavier than earlier estimates, at more than 9 tons. With this size and appetite, they would need a large range, and therefore also be relatively rare in the ecosystem of the time."
It's big-boned
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
I understand the they used birds because of the evolutionary history, and crocs due to the age of their species and reptilian nature, but I doubt using the human body as a reference to the bodies of our millions of years old relatives would give a clear picture, and the same goes for this experiment. And it could be the case that the birds they used didn't evolve from t-rex, but rather some other (possibly completely unrelated) species of bird, which would skew the results. If I had to guess, I'd say that 30% is in the margin of error for this kind of work.
Well, this new evidence certainly makes this scene a lot less hot....
Monstar L
Good thing George Lucas didn't make Jurassic Park, or he'd be re-releasing the movie every time we found out something new about a dinosaur.
It's about time the poor T-Rex started getting some more respect. When I was a kid, it was the biggest, baddest carnivore out there. Then it got demoted from a vicious hunter to a carrion eater, sniffing out dead carcasses like a vulture. Then they started putting feathers on it. Oh! The humiliation!. Glad to see they are upping it's need to feed.
Still, I guess it's fared better than the Brontosaurus. Not only did they go extinct, but they apparently never existed at all. A skeleton of a smaller animal, called Apatosaurus was discovered before the larger Brontosuarus was. However, on closer examination, it was discovered that the Apatosaurus was simply a juvenile and the Brontosaurus was the full grown adult version of the same animal. Since the Apatosaurus was found first, that became the official name. Poor Brontosaurus.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
This clearly shows God's divine hand in the creation of the dinosaurs, as us simple humans can't even get it right. It proves unequivocally that scientists don't even know what the hell they are doing. If we can't even trust their mangling of God's creations of Crocodile, Bird and Dinosaur, how can we even trust their so-called "Carbon Dating" witchcraft? Obviously scientists' inherent atheist devil-worship is to blame for letting them act as tools of Satan. Serpents were said to exist, in fact they are partially the cause of the downfall of man when he ate from the tree of knowledge. The inherent weakness of women enables temptation to take root, and the inherent protectionist and paternal nature of Man made him weak to his wife's request to partake out of the love such superiority brings.
The Bible is the only 100% true thing in existence. Its been verified time and time again, through the creation of Adam, and Eve from his spareribs as proven by the "Eve" mitochondrial theory, to Noah's flood, as proven by the ice-shield that surrounded the Earth (after all, what else would block the UV rays to let Noah and Abraham live to be hundreds of years old?), to Jesus our-lord-and-savior who has been proven to exist via numerous secondary documents in the Roman Empire. There is so much science in the Bible that us minions of God have recently discovered, Did you know that the Bible even predicted the discovery of bacteria?
"And ... neither shall you eat any flesh that is torn of beasts in the field; you shall cast it to the dogs" (Exodus 22:31)
How could a multiple Millenia old collection of documents predict such things without microscopes if it weren't for the divine insight of God? Clearly, the Bible is the only 100% true thing in existence. It is absurd to think otherwise. Science can't touch God. Jesus died for your sins, so you would no longer have to sacrifice your livestock. Such a loving God we have, letting us spare our livestock so we may not go hungry by sacrificing his only Son. Repent sinners, you will one day face judgement!
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
the adolescents could add 11 pounds in weight in a single day. The adult was found to be 30% heavier than earlier estimates at more than 9 tons.
isn't anyone concerned about this dinosaur obesity epidemic?!
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Actually, some very big bull elephants have reached up to around 12 tons. But that's a minor point, because you're comparing apples and oranges.
"Only" 9 tons...for a flesh-eating biped. Think about that for a bit. No other land-dwelling meat-eater has ever come close to the size of the largest predatory dinosaurs. And all those dinosaurs were bipeds.
Elephants are herbivores, and they are strictly quadrupeds with columnar legs. The dinosaur analog for elephants are the sauropods, the largest of which reached up to 10 times the weight of the biggest elephants.
9 tons at the heavier, revised estimate? Elephants can weigh close to 7 tons. Thanks for ruining my childhood
I felt that way also when I read about T-Rex size estimates some years ago. Then they were six or seven tons (i.e., elephant-sized). But I had to remember that they were not, of course, the elephants of their time. They were the tigers of their time. So, you scale a tiger up to elephant size and you've got a pretty impressive predator.