We haven’t yet found a complete tyrannosaurus rex skeleton
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Owing to their position as an apex predator at the very top of the food chain, there aren’t all that many T. rex fossils out there to find. So far, about fifty skeletons have been discovered and none of these are entirely complete. Amongst the most impressive is a T. rex called Sue, named after the woman who found the bones on federally owned land in South Dakota. In her prime, Sue would have stood more than 13 feet tall and weighed in at something in the region of 9 tons. She was also the subject of a lengthy and complicated legal battle as described in the 2014 documentary “Dinosaur 13.”
The first person who does manage to lay claim to a complete tyrannosaurus rex skeleton is likely to become very wealthy indeed. Sue, despite only being 85% complete, sold at auction for $8 million. Another significant find of an almost complete tyrannosaur, discovered along with a triceratops, attracted bids of $5.5 million but didn’t sell, as even that failed to meet the reserve price.
Hunter or scavenger?
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Although it may be the most famous of all dinosaurs, there is still a great deal we don’t know about tyrannosaurus rex. One of the biggest areas of contention through the years has been whether it was a hunter or scavenger.
In 2007, the discovery of a remarkable fossil may have finally settled the question once and for all. The fossil was of a hadrosaur, a large plant eating dinosaur, which was found to have a T. rex tooth embedded in its spine. The bone had grown back around the tooth, indicating that the animal must have been alive when a T. rex took a lump out of it but had been lucky enough to survive the attack.
Whether the T. rex hunted or scavenged for its food most likely isn’t an either/or question. Like modern day lions and tigers, the tyrant lizard king probably wasn’t above scavenging should the opportunity of a free meal present itself.
T. rex may have had the most powerful bite of any creature to walk the Earth
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It’s not easy to determine just how powerful the bite of an animal that has been extinct for 65 million years may have been. However, scientists at Liverpool University believe they have come up with an answer. Musculoskeletal biologist Karl Bates and his colleagues developed a computer model which enabled them to compare the T. rex with some modern day carnivores. Their results showed that the bite of a tyrannosaurus rex wasn’t just powerful – it was more powerful than anybody had expected.
An adult male lion can chomp down on its prey with a force of around 4450 Newtons, but that’s little more than a tickle compared to a large tyrannosaurus rex, which could manage as much as 60,000 Newtons. This apex predator even boasted a bite three times as powerful as a great white shark and would have been rivalled only by the biggest of marine predators like megalodon and Predator X.
Those puny arms were stronger than you might think
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Powerful and terrifying as it might have been, the T. rex has suffered plenty of ridicule over the years on account of its tiny arms. At around a metre long, they do look a touch silly on a dinosaur bigger than a school bus, and they certainly weren’t much use for feeding as they couldn’t even reach its mouth. However, many scientists believe T. rex’s arms were far from useless and it may have used them to grapple with prey or help it clamber up off the ground.
Research suggests the T. rex may have been able to lift around 450 pounds with each arm. That may not be a huge amount for a dinosaur that stood up to twenty feet tall and weighed in at around 8 tons, but it’s easily enough to beat even the strongest of humans in an arm wrestling contest.
They may have hunted in packs
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