A friend visiting relatives in Kentucky visited a bible story attraction that showed model of T.Rex with a man riding him bareback. Keeping the story alive.
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"....with a head almost as long as Tom Cruise is tall and a smile every bit as devastating." Really? This is the most erudite analogy one can come with? How sadly media-bound and myopic NYT has become. Missing people like Wm F Buckley and his breadth and knowledge of the richness of the English language.
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@Em How would you improve upon this description? Anyone can be a critic; you could have added something with your comment.
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"T. rex apparently put on about 5 pounds a day during it's teenage years."
Sounds like me during the holidays.
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As deadly predators humans are far worse than the T-Rex. There never has been and probably never will be anything as destructive as humans.
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Great reading. How tall at the gaiting withers is the adult Rex/Regina in the first rendering? Thanks
3
I don't like the reference to "T. rexes" - if your high school latin can take the strain, you should say "T. reges".
14
“We have as much evidence that T. rex had feathers as we do that Neanderthals had hair.” Great article, but maybe a bit exaggerated to compare Mesozoic fossils to Pleistocene ones since DNA provides evidence for Neanderthal not available for T rex? I believe I read a Nature paper about red hair genes in Neanderthal.
14
But how did they fit on the Ark with Noah and the other animals?
23
God made them docile. Of course.
10
For those who are doing dinosaurs with young children, I highly recommend "Tyrannosaurus Was a Beast," a book of dinosaur poems by the children's poet Jack Prelutsky and illustrated by Arnold Lobel (of Frog and Toad fame). It features a number of dinos, each in its own verse, and the variety of styles is also lovely.
"Tyrannosaurus was a beast
that had no friends, to say the least.
It ruled the ancient out-of-doors,
and slaughtered other dinosaurs."
There might be an outdated "fact" or two, but it's completely enchanting.
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I've still got the little plastic dinosaurs I bought at the AMNH when I was a child. Nowadays kids have far better models to choose from, but for kids of all ages, the fascination endures.
15
The article states: "Just last week, a smallish tyrannosaur from North America was reported."
Who was it reported to? I need to know what department, in case it happens to me.
21
What is the evolutionary advantage of tiny, useless arms? That has always puzzled me about T. Rex. CJO, Michigan
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@Cynthia Oberg
Tyrannosaurus rex had tiny arms because it had the largest head of any land-animal. Its head evolved into an incredible weapon that could pulverize bone and rip chunks of flesh (500lbs with each bite) from its prey.
Having a large head required large neck muscles. T. rex is famous for a lot of things. Add to the list: strongest neck of any land-animal.
Since both the neck muscles and the shoulder/arm muscles connect to the same bones, a trade off must occur. Humans have large, strong arms, but relatively weak necks. Of course, this is crucial for a bipedal animal like you that interacts with the world so much with your arms.
A T. rex, on the other hand, had no use for large arms. Its entire body evolved to propel its massive head and jaws at great speed into the body of another animal: massive legs for running, strong tail for balance, keen forward vision for targeting prey, etc. Everything that did not support that mission was secondary.
In short, T. rexes had small arms because they had massive heads/jaws which required massive neck muscles. Neck muscles and arm muscles must fight over space on the neck/shoulder bones.
Also, its arms were pretty strong too, each roughly the same length as an adult human's arms, but capable of lifting 600-1000lbs each.
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@Cynthia Oberg
Found this:
The Appendage that Nobody Talks About
It’s time to get this issue out in the open—namely, those useless, wimpy arms on T-Rex. Am I the only person they bother? Was this a basic design flaw?
Everyone secretly cringes at this shrunken armamentarium. I mean, here he is, the terror of the primordial earth, the original Thunder Thighs, with a head the size of a Bentley and a mouth carpeted with vicious daggers. And then .... oh no! Dainty little clawsies.. the arms of a saurian Shirley Temple.
Why be embarrassed for a dinosaur? We all should be—especially hard rock bands and motorcycle clubs that take on T-Rex as their emblem; groups that supposedly wield a macho arm. You couldn't even get a tattoo on T-Rex's arms; there isn’t room.
Scientists rarely mention the arms. We hear a lot about T-Rex's bulldozer of a head, his mighty haunches—and those teeth that can rip through hide as tough as oak like a hairdresser's scissors slicing a set of bangs.
T-Rex's arms are the Uranus of paleontology: they induce giggles. They get no respect. Their grip could easily be broken by your average grammar school teacher.
And what good are mini-arms to break the descent of a creature like that? “I've fallen and I can't get up because I've got these useless little ice tongs attached to my torso.”
If we’d had arms like that we would have disappeared from the cladogram long before those arms could even hold the tools to build our highway to oblivion.
22
T Rex was king for millions of years, that and those that came before him and after. Queens Victoria and Elizabeth are not even blips in the story of creation as are we all including Trump. But who will tell our story if in our hubris we can not survive what we do to our earth? Sorry to darken the story of the fascinating King Rex we see only in bones.
9
It's not the biggest though. There's like two or three other carnivorous species that were larger. Spinosaurus, Giganotosaurus, Carcharodontosaurus etc.
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@StoneWorth
Biggest doesn't always mean baddest. Spinosaurus was more like a long-legged crocodile (I'm not saying it was a crocodile, just that physiologically, it was more adapted to life in coastal water).
The other two were certainly longer and potentially heavier, but they were "inferior" to T. rex in a number of areas, such as intelligence and jaw strength/neck strength (both of which were critical to T. rex's ascent and to the formers' decline/extinction).
I always like to say that it took the convergence of massive volcanic eruptions and a 10km wide asteroid to wipe-out the T. rex, whereas Spinosaurus, Giganotosaurus, Carcharodontosaurus were driven to extinction through evolutionary forces.
Either way, all four were amazing creatures. Their presence on Earth is hard to fathom. Largest land predator today: polar bear, ~ 1500lbs, 10ft long. Largest theropods (such as the four mentioned above): 40-60ft long, 15,000-40,000 lbs.
24
Fascinating story, thank you! 100 million years, Homo sapiens a few hundred thousand years at most! For sure, T-Rex deserves respect! Just imagine!
15
Endlessly fascinating. But my vote goes to the equally-fearsome allosaurus. No kissin’ cousin to the T-Rex, it.
More importantly to me is the value of science and scholarship. The politically-ignorant—which describes just about everything Republican—is so deep into climate denial. This absurdity is ruining all the recent advances that research has made in the fascinating field of paleontology. I simply wish that more people were interested in subjects outside of their ideological comfort zones. Geez, does everything have to be about politics?
We are losing birds and mammals—land and sea—because some of us are so wedded to profit and an obscene lust to despoil the earth for just a few dollars. It seems to have never occurred to those who hate study and intellectual curiosity that studying the past can provide clues to the future. At the end of the day, it isn’t about border security or abortion or gender rights—it’s about survival on a finite and tiny planet for ourselves and our posterity.
The departed T-Rex had it good:no human beings to eat. He (or she) would have cast up its meal in disgust: inedible and utterly unsatisfying because it was nothing but bones. Nothing tasty; like a brain or a heart.
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@Red Sox, ‘04, ‘07, ‘13, ‘18 You are so right, unfortunately. If you have read Elizabeth Kolbert's book The Sixth Extinction, you know this is already happening on a massive scale, and will only escalate as the century wears on. The short-sightedness of climate change deniers in the Republican Party (and the cynicism) will doom us as surely as the meteor wiped out the dinosaurs.
25
Nice graphic of the contemporary version of a T. Rex.
I blew it up until it filled my MacBook screen and then I took a screen shot and amped it up in Photoshop. Great for e-mail!
Thanks for that and for a very interesting article.
6
Should you wish to see the original T. rex, the holotype of the species, please visit the superb "Dinosaurs in Their Time" permanent exhibition at Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. The fearsome beast faces off against another of her kind, fighting over the remains of an Edmontosaurus. Overall the exhibition is superb; visitors walk through three distinct, large dioramas- also through time, as the exhibition is laid out chronologically. Allosaurus, also mentioned in the article, features in the Jurassic component of Dinosaurs in Their Time, setting her sights on a juvenile Apatosaurus, while nearby Stegosaurus, Diplodicus and other specimens view the scene.
17
Both parents and teachers can testify to the captivating affect dinosaurs, especially T Rex, has on children. And this enchantment apparently continues on into adulthood if the financial success of the Jurassic Park films are any indication.
From dragging its tail in a death struggle with King Kong in 1933 to being the hero in Jurassic World, T Rex’s teeth, ferociousness, and roar are its hallmarks.
However, one paleontologist had suggested that the connection between dinosaurs and today’s birds may suggest that the dinosaurs might have shared something else in common—the sound that it produced. This dinosaur researcher proposed that that dinosaurs may have “quacked” rather than “roared.”
If this suspicion were to be correct, the film portrayal of T Rex may influence on our perception. The next time you watch a dinosaur film, replace the roar with a quack.
Although it may not detract from its lethality, a T Rex quacking would not have the same reverberation as a mighty roar.
23
Not quite on-topic, but a T. Rex joke.
I took my son and his two little ones to a dinosaur exhibit, with
models (not full scale). The guide was explaining T. Rex to kids, and asked the group "What could he have done with those two little hands with two claws?"
My son quipped, "He could have counted until 4".
70
When I was in 2nd grade (early 60s), Dinosaurs had not yet caught the attention of children. I was in a study where 4 children were taught about Dinosaurs. This inspired a lifetime interest in Science. Dinosaurs - particularly the T-Rex are both terrifying - and safe. Children can imagine what they were like, without fear of encountering them.
32
Apparently there is a question of whether dinosaurs were warm-blooded or cold-blooded. Either way, how did they modulate their internal temperature? If something the size of a pig or cow can easily overheat from exertion, and they have a much smaller mass and cross-section, what did the dinosaurs do?
Whales are surrounded by water, a much more efficient conveyor of heat from a body than air is. Elephants have heavily-vascularized ears, which they flap to cool off, and also sometimes submerge themselves. How about dinosaurs? How did they control their heat?
11
@Palladia I had thought that consensus was reached. Birds, the descendants of Dinosaurs, ARE warm blooded. A cold blooded Dinosaur is metabolically impossible. I am afraid we have to wait until all the older Paleontologists who can't accept warm blooded Dinosaurs are dead (like Continental Drift/Plate Tectonics-had to wait until all the older Geologists who couldn't accept idea died).
21
@Palladia Sounds like a good question. Maybe those long tails helped? Maybe we should picture the T-Rexes with very short bursts of activity, dashing and leaping on their prey, then taking it easy for a long time to cool off. Sort of like alligators? And the gigantic plant eaters moving very, very slowly...
7
@Palladia--I think the consensus is that the giant dinosaurs could not have been cold blooded. They may have evolved from something that was, or maybe the very early ones, also small, were. With great size come great temperature regulation issues.
6
If you want to see a fascinating relationship (visually, at least) compare the foot of a cassowary to the foot of a T-rex.
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@Alan Dean Foster
And, old friend, I point commenters to "A Gun for Dinosaur," a short story by L. Sprague de Camp, published in 1956.
6
I love the brief description of developmental growth in this piece. It's fascinating to think "half a school bus" is juvenile, and that it had hair, AND that it gained 5lb a day.
19