Billions and billions of tyrannosaurs walked the Earth
Scientists arrived at the estimate by using calculations based on size, metabolism, and the populations of animals today.
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Posted: Apr 23, 2021 5:17 PM ET | Last Updated: April 23
Over approximately 2.5 million years, North America was likely home to 2.5 billion Tyrannosaurus rexes. Less than 100 have been dug up and studied by paleontologists, according to a UC Berkeley study( Image by Julius Csotonyi, courtesy of Science magazine)
How many Tyrannosaurus rexes roamed North America during the Cretaceous period?
That s a question Charles Marshall pestered his paleontologist colleagues with for years until he finally teamed up with his students to find an answer.
What the team found, published this month in the journal Science, is that about 20,000 adult T. rexes probably lived at any one time, give or take a factor of 10, which is in the ballpark of what most of his colleagues guessed.
What few paleontologists had fully grasped, he said, including himself, is that this means that some 2.5 billion lived and died over the approximately 2 1/2 million years the dinosaur walked the earth.
Number of T-rexes that lived in North America could have been in billions syfy.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from syfy.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
5 days ago in Features
FILE - In this Tuesday, March 7, 2006 file photo, life-sized Tyrannosaurus rex models are unloaded for a dinosaur exhibition in Potsdam, Germany. A study released on Thursday, April 15, 2021 calculates that 2.5 billion Tyrannosaurus rex prowled North America over a couple million years or so, with maybe 20,000 at any given time. (AP Photo/Sven Kaestner) Photo: Associated Press
By SETH BORENSTEIN AP Science Writer
One Tyrannosaurus rex seems scary enough. Now picture 2.5 billion of them. That’s how many of the fierce dinosaur king probably roamed Earth over the course of a couple million years, a new study finds.
Study: 2 5 billion T rex roamed Earth, but not all at once more1049.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from more1049.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.