rex,” Healy said, “would need the same daily calories as 80 people” on a diet of 2,500 calories per day. With each dinosaur’s estimated metabolic rate and daily needs in mind, Healy and his colleagues were looking to see how each would fare on a diet of easy, dead meals.įor an adult T. “We then let loose different-sized theropods on the landscape, ranging from 1 kg to 15,000 kg, with simple foraging rules that make them move towards food items, eat until stomach capacity is full, move away if a bigger individual arrives, and so on,” Healy said in an email. rex to study, Healy and his collaborators instead created a virtual landscape where about 8 pounds (4 kilograms) of meat would randomly appear. rex would have fared if the dinosaur was restricted to a diet of dead meat. That’s what led Trinity College Dublin ecology graduate student Kevin Healy and his colleagues to model just how a full-grown T. Given that time travel and genetically engineered tyrannosaurs are still in the realm of science fiction, researchers have tried to find alternate routes to envision how T. rex spent trying to ambush prey versus sniff out what was already dead. Yet the question remained as to how much of its daily life T. Healed wounds from tyrannosaur bites and bones bearing frightful punctures from feeding told the gory tale. Paleontologists eventually found solid evidence that the dinosaur caught live prey as well as gorged on carrion when the opportunity arose. rex was an active predator or subsisted only on rotting flesh.
This kicked off a long and, to some paleontologists, tiresome controversy about whether T. rex was nothing but a filthy, lazy scavenger. rex ever found were put on display at the American Museum of Natural History in December 1906, The New York Times wrote that the owner of those fossilized gams must have been “the prize-fighter of antiquity,” adding speed to an animal “who ran with great agility on his two hind feet and could play frightful havoc with his savage canine teeth.”Īnd that’s the way it stayed for decades, up until 1994, when paleontologist Jack Horner took a swipe at the popular dinosaur by suggesting that T. rex has been considered the ultimate apex predator. rex consumed, these visions of the dinosaur skirt around the edges of a persistent mystery in the Cretaceous celebrity’s day-to-day - how did a 40-foot-long, 9-ton carnivore get enough meat to fuel its hot-running body?įrom the time the first known skeleton was described by paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn in 1905, T. The tri-horned Triceratops and the duck-billed Edmontosaurus are the traditional tyrannosaur favorites in artistic renderings of the past, with Hollywood throwing in a few cowardly lawyers for good measure. A dinosaur whose name translates to tyrant lizard king must have been able to gobble up anything it wanted, and a mouth bristling with thick, serrated teeth makes it clear that meat was always on the menu. rex went about getting its daily bread.Īt first glance, the question “What did Tyrannosaurus rex eat?” would seem simple enough to answer. For example, paleontologists are still trying to figure out how T. rex could see about six times as far as an animal with eyes just 3 feet off the ground - but let’s leave it there.ĭespite all that, much remains unknown about this famous flesh-ripper.
#TREX SIZE FULL#
rex went through a teenage growth spurt, packing on almost 5 pounds a day until it reached its full stature by age 20 it started reproducing by 18 years of age it walked at 6 mph and ran at 15 to 25 mph ( far slower than the fictional speed demon chasing the Jeep in “Jurassic Park”) when it caught up to prey, it had a maximum bite force of 12,800 pounds, the most powerful of any terrestrial predator its neck muscles were estimated to be strong enough that it could have thrown a 110-pound chunk of meat about 15 feet into the air before catching it. Paleontologists have extracted a slew of tyrannosaur secrets from old bones: T. This ongoing conversation has given us a glimpse into how T. Every year, new research is added to the towering list of papers that try to draw new secrets from old bones and dispute what others have said before.
Tyrannosaurus rex is the most extensively studied fossil creature ever known.
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