Webosaurs Blog

"Hey Rexxy?" "Yeah Rex?" "Let's just stick with prairie dogs, okay?"

Q: Did T-rex Ever Battle an adult Sauropod or come across one? -sKAC

A: Really great question sKAC! So great that I seriously spent about an hour and a half trying to track the answer down yesterday. Unfortunately, like so many dinosaur questions, couldn’t find a definite answer. However, there is some good food for thought.

Remember that Tyrannosaurus Rex was only around during the Late Cretaceous. Many species of sauropod (including some of the biggest) had gone extinct by that point but there were certainly others that roamed the same lands as the famous T-Rex. T-Rex would have encountered sauropods like Alamosaurus and Dsylocosaurus during the Late Cretaceous in North America.

Still the question remains – did they do battle? Probably not. While the Late Cretaceous sauropods were not as big as earlier species, they were still huge. He may have been the most dangerous predator of his time, but T-Rex would have had a tough time taking down a sauropod. One well placed stomp would have crushed T-Rex, either killing it immediately or leaving an injury that would slowly kill it. Sauropods also likely traveled in groups – making it all that much harder. Even if a sauropod went down, T-Rex couldn’t eat the whole thing by itself in one meal and most would go to waste or other scavengers.

More likely, T-Rex would prey on smaller animals like hadrosaurs, making for a more efficient and easier meal.

What do you think?

-Rex

MMmmm... delicious gymnosperms

Q: OK Sauropods had to eat a lot of vegetation if they lived in groups. Were the trees and bushes bigger to supply the dinosaurs needs? Were there dino-trees? -Morty

A: Really great question Morty. The answer isn’t quite what you think. If some paleontologists are to be believed, dinosaurs were warm-blooded animals. This means they had to eat a ton of food. You’d think that crews of sauropods were roaming around the Mesozoic just destroying everything in their path. While this was probably true, they got away with it because animal and plant life was actually more sparse than it is today. There just weren’t as many dinosaurs around, so what damage the sauropods did wasn’t too bad because there weren’t very many of them.

The Mesozoic was a very different landscape than the one we have today. For most of the Mesozoic, plant life consisted entirely of gymnosperms. Gymnosperms are seed-bearing plants like ginkgos, ferns, cycads and conifers. Up until the end of the Jurassic, conifers were the most dominant plants around. It was at the end of the Jurassic that we finally started to see what we call angiosperms, which are the flowering pants we know and love today. It is a safe bet that sauropods munched down on all of these delicious veggies!

To address a couple other questions….

Q: What is the fattest dinosaur ever?i wanna know. -Faiththethird. Answer here.

Q: What was the smallest dinosaur? this question has been bugging me please answer. -Iamrich. Answer here.

Q: Were there any bioluminescent dinosaurs? (which means they glow up ) – Hornstrkier. A: I could not find any information at all about this. Let me know if you find anything differently!

-Rex