![]() ![]() The dinosaur is thought to have spent much of its time in the water, letting it get away with tinier hind limbs. Realistically, Spinosaurus almost certainly weighed more. But when estimating Spinosaurus's weight based only on femur size, it comes out at just 3,600 pounds. The animal was about 50 feet long from its snout to the tip of its tail, which would make it longer than T. No species demonstrates this conundrum better than Spinosaurus, a semiaquatic dinosaur that lived in what's now northern Africa about a hundred million years ago. rex species, which includes some more “slender” specimens. This variety, some researchers argue, may even hold within the T. rex appear to have had stockier builds, while other species had longer, more slender bodies. In addition, body mass is just one way of parsing bigness, and not all predatory dinosaurs had the same dimensions. Perhaps tyrannosaur leg bones were slightly over-engineered to take the stress of running, which would lead researchers to overshoot Scotty's actual weight. There's some evidence that tyrannosaurs may have been faster and more agile than other groups of large predatory dinosaurs, such as the earlier allosaurs. For one, animals don't use their skeletons to passively hold up their weight bones also endure the forces of motion. However, this bone-measuring method isn't foolproof. rex at the Field Museum, that fossil comes out about 900 pounds lighter. When the same methods are applied to Sue, the famously complete T. Scotty's femur was a whopping eight inches across-which means that Scotty's two legs could hold up more than 19,500 pounds, give or take a couple tons. And its main leg bone, or femur, in particular provided a vital clue to Scotty's size.īy studying many living animals, scientists have found that the wider an animal's femur, the more weight that the bone tends to hold up. rex known to have died around the age of 28. But once Scotty's bones were freed, Persons's team could finally reconstruct the dinosaur's age and size.Ĭross-sections of its bones show that their structure is remarkably robust, resembling that of a different T. The animal's massive bones were firmly stuck in very hard rock, making them extremely difficult to extract for study. It has taken more than two decades, however, for scientists to come to full grips with Scotty's remains. Discovered in 2010 in Montana’s famed Hell Creek Formation of the late Cretaceous, the 40-foot-long fossil took four years to excavate and prepare. With 170 of its 300-odd bones preserved, this scientifically important but privately owned skeleton is currently at the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin, Germany. This nearly whole, deep-black skull belongs to the most complete specimen of Tyrannosaurus rex on display in Europe, an individual nicknamed Tristan Otto. By that point in the field season, all they had on hand to celebrate the occasion was a bottle of scotch-hence the nickname. rex's discovery, the field crew wanted to raise a toast to the creature. Scotty has actually been known to paleontologists since 1991, when its bones were dug up at a site in Saskatchewan, Canada. “It would not surprise me that those animals turn out to increase the range of body size-potentially to overlap or even surpass what we know from T. “As more specimens of those other theropods are found, we're going to find their Scottys: their particularly large, particularly old individuals,” says study leader Scott Persons, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Alberta. ![]() rex is one of the best represented extinct dinosaurs, with more than 20 fossil individuals identified. The find suggests that large predatory dinosaurs probably got older and bigger than paleontologists would have surmised based on currently available fossils. “It was not an easy life, even for the king of predatory dinosaurs, judging by all these injuries,” says Nizar Ibrahim, a paleontologist at the University of Detroit Mercy who wasn't involved with the study. The dinosaur's remains include a broken and healed rib, a massive growth of bone in between two teeth-a sign of infection-and broken tailbones possibly maimed by another tyrannosaur's bite. Some 68 million years ago, the Canadian landscape Scotty knew was a subtropical coastal paradise-but life was no vacation. Learn which ones were the largest and the smallest, what dinosaurs ate and how they behaved, as well as surprising facts about their extinction. Over a thousand dinosaur species once roamed the Earth. ![]()
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