TREX

Tyrannosaurus rex tearing apart a carcass while a flock of nervous herbivores skitter by in the foreground. Tyrannosaurus were mostly small and unimportant for the better part of their 100-million-year history. But the final 20 million years of the Cretaceous before the mass extinction, some species like T rex reached outrageous size and fearsomeness

Nouchetdu38, Paolo Tanino have particularly liked this photo

Comments

Dinesh ^club

. . . . I asked Brusatte en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_L._Brusatte if T.rex deserves its awesome reputation.

“I mean, T.rex is, as far as we know, the biggest predator that’s ever lived on land,” he said. “Today it’s the polar bear. T.rex could stomp on a polar bear.”

There were other dinosaurs that kind of got up to T.rex’s size as predators , but none of them were quite as big and bulky. It really is that icon, and it deserves its place – I mean, it’s 13 meters long and 7 tons,” he said, laughing at the absurd dimensions, ‘There’s nothing alive like that today.

”It would have had binocular vision like we do”, Brusatte continued. “It had big optic lobes in its brain. It had huge olfactory lobes, so it could smell really, really well. It had an inner ear that could hear low-frequency sounds. It was an intelligent animal. It had a pretty big brain. It wasn’t just a brawny thing. It was a pretty brainy thing too.

. . . . For Brusatte, though, the most interesting thing about T. rex isn’t its turbocharged biology, but its meteoric rise at the end of the Cretaceous, and it's even more precipitous (and rather more literal) meteoric fall.

“One thing about tyrannosaurus that a lot of people don’t necessarily realize is that T. rex really was the last of the dinosaurs,” he said wistfully. “OIt was there when the asteroid hit. Something as dominant and iconic as T. rex, it goes out right away. Or even if it was the volcanoes that did it, it’s still incredibly sudden. You have this great dinosaur, and it just goes away, and within a few tens of thousand years you have an incredible diversity of new mammals. Nothing near the size of T.rex, but geological terms that is a ‘knife edge’. You go from world dominated by these big dinosaurs, with T. rex at the top of the food chain, to what we see here. If you think T. rex is the ultimate dinosaur, the ultimate predator, that wasn’t enough to get it through what happened at the end of the Creatceous. ~ Page 178 / 179

4 months ago. Edited 4 months ago.

Sign-in to write a comment.

		Page color
		Comments Panel
		Screen Margins
▼▲
		Widescreen

← Among Dinesh's photos

See also...

Keywords

Authorizations, license

TREX

Ξ	Frame Options
3 - +