Study says 2.5 billion T. rex roamed Earth
Population existed over a couple million years By SETH BORENSTEIN, Associated Press
Published: April 20, 2021, 6:00am
Share: Life-sized Tyrannosaurus rex models are unloaded for a dinosaur exhibition in 2006 in Potsdam, Germany. A study released on Thursday 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. (Sven Kaestner/Associated Press)
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.
About 20,000 adult
Tyrannosaurus rexes probably lived at any one time, give or take a factor of 10, a new study suggests.
The number is in the ballpark of what most researchers guessed, but what’s few paleontologists had fully grasped, says Charles Marshall, is what that means: some 2.5 billion lived and died over the approximately 2 1/2 million years the dinosaur walked the Earth.
Until now, no one has been able to compute population numbers for long-extinct animals, and George Gaylord Simpson, one of the most influential paleontologists of the last century, felt that it couldn’t be done.
“When I hold a fossil in my hand, I can’t help wondering at the improbability that this very beast was alive millions of years ago…”
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2.5 Billion Tyrannosaurus Rexes Roamed North America over a Period of 2.5 Million Years Over approximately 2.5 million years, North America likely hosted 2.5 billion Tyrannosaurus rexes, a minuscule proportion of which 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, to be published this week 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.
Scientists Estimate All-time T. Rex Population Was 2.5 Billion
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A new study suggests that up to 2.5 billion Tyrannosaurus Rex dinosaurs lived on Earth over a period of a few million years.
However, the research shows that not many of these powerful creatures lived in the same place at the same time.
Tyrannosaurus Rex, commonly known as T. rex, existed on Earth for millions of years. Scientists involved in the study estimate about 2.5 billion of them lived over a period of 2.4 million years. The dinosaurs mostly lived in the area of the world now known as North America.
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