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Tyrannosaurus Rex
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One of and possibly the most popular/well known Dinosaur ever discovered. A massive carnivore, growing to nearly or even over 40 feet long and five or six tons, the "Tyrant lizard king" is the third largest land-carnivore ever discovered. Only the newly found giant predators in Argentina (Gigantosaurus and another unnamed carnivore) are larger, and even then not by all that much (a few feet longer or so).
Being such a popular dinosaur, Tyranosaurus is one of the easiest to get information on. Skeleton finds are relatively rare though, only about two dozen Tyrannosaurus skeletons have ever been discovered. The biggest, most complete, and most fought over being "Sue," who was auctioned off after many a legal battle. Tyrannosaurus lived in the late Cretaceous period, about 85 to 65 million years ago, meaning the species existed about 20 million years--a bit short-lived for a Dinosaur but about average for a land animal.
Some scientists, like Jack Horner believe that Tyrannosaurus Rex couldn't have been a predator, that he was too big and clumsy to do anything but scavenge for food. Tyrannosaurus's arms did indeed seem to be too small to be used for grabbing prey--others point out there are succesful predators today with no arms to grab with, sharks, wolves, snakes, and others. Even as difficult as determining the speeds of extinct animals is, the figures for Tyrannosaurus Rex seem to be fairly consistant--20 to 25 mph, a bit slow to keep up with some of the herbivores. Horner also thinks Tyrannosaurus's legs were built more for walking long distances than chasing anything down. The best evidence for Tyrannosaurus hunting anything is a hadrosaur(duckbilled dinosaur) skeleton that was discovered with a healed T-Rex bite on its tail.
Whether T-Rex was a hunter or a pure scavenger, or a bit of
both (really, this is most likely if you want my opinion) is something you
should make your own mind up about, as it's hard to say whether or not we'll
ever have any definate proof on the matter. We do know T-Rex ate Triceratops
though, as skeletons have been found with Tyrannosaur bite marks and teeth
imbedded in them, and a sample of fossilized Tyrannosaur dung had a pice of
Triceratops's frill in it. Whether they were found dead or killed by Tyrannosaurus
isn't determinable though.
It is easy to imagine these two massive Dinosaurs going at it though, the
image is presented so often, in Dinosaur books and videos...in a sense, modern
literature has made these two Dinosaurs arch-rivals.