Print article 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. Using calculations based on body size, sexual maturity and the creatures’ energy needs, a team at the University of California, Berkeley figured out just how many T. rex lived over 127,000 generations, according to a study in Thursday’s journal Science. It’s a first-of-its-kind number, but just an estimate with a margin of error that is the size of a T. rex. “That’s a lot of jaws,” said study lead author Charles Marshall, director of the University of California Museum of Paleontology. “That’s a lot of teeth. That’s a lot of claws.”
How many T rexes were there? Billions - ScienceBlog com scienceblog.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from scienceblog.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Researchers find 2.5bn T-rex roamed Earth
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Tyrannosaurus rex seems scary enough. Now picture 2.5 billion of them.
That is how many of the fierce dinosaur king probably roamed Earth over the course of a couple of million years, a new study has found.
Using calculations based on body size, sexual maturity and the creatures’ energy needs, a team at the University of California, Berkeley calculated how many T-rex lived over 127,000 generations.
Geologist Bill Simpson uses a feather duster to clean the skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex at the Field Museum in Chicago on June 11, 2015.
Photo: Reuters
The study, published in
Analysis of what’s known about the dinosaur leads to conclusion there were 2.5 billion over time.
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.
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.
2 5 billion T rex roamed Earth, but not all at once msn.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from msn.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.