Posts Tagged ‘tyrannosaurus rex’

Daily Dino Fact: T-Rex takes on the sauropods

Wednesday, March 31st, 2010

"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

Daily Dino Fact: Curse of the Rexxy

Thursday, December 24th, 2009

Q: How come the Tyrannosaurus Rex (like Me, Rexxy, Rex, ect) have such small arms? Were they used for balance? – MetalMeat

A: There are a few hypothesis to this question. Here are a few of the more popular ones:

1) An early hypothesis about T-Rex’s arms is that they were used to help the dino stand up (see picture above). While their arms were tiny, it has been shown that T-Rex had very strong muscles and the small arms are no exception

2) The arms were used as meat hooks while the T-Rex ate. The claws on their hands are very sharp and could have been used to hold their prey while they munched.

3) The arms are actually vestigials. Vestigials are organs or body parts that have grown useless with evolution. Humans, for instance, have a little pointy tail bone at the end of our spines still left over from when we evolved from simians.

Evidence has shown that many T-Rex’s had their arms broken during their lifetime meaning they could go without them for a long time. No one really knows the answer and the subject continues to be a big debate in the world of paleontology!

-Rex

Pterry’s True Science: Tyrannosaurus Rex’s mini-me

Friday, September 18th, 2009

Good day Webosaurs, Pterry here. Just about had my latest invention all finished until Horns and Stretch fell into the lab and broke everything. Next time I’ll have both of them saying Uncle-saurus.

Anyways, got just wind of a new discovery from northeastern China. Paleontologists have just found a new dinosaur nicknamed “Raptorex,” which displayed all the same features of a T-Rex but at a fraction of the side. Raptorex stood only 9 feet tall and weighed about 143 lbs. T-Rex, in contrast, weighed about 5 tons.

Raptorex lived about 60 million years before T-Rex came about. This is an extremely exciting discovery for scientists as it gives a new link in the chain of understanding how T-Rex came to be in its evolutionary development. Strange that it would come from such a small dinosaur!

You’ll have to excuse me. Horns is sleeping now and I have a firecracker with his name on it!!