Forget all you know from Jurassic Park: For speed, T.rex beats velociraptors
Original Story by Traci Watson | Special to USA TODAY
Tyrannosaurus rex Photos TReX left vs Spinosaurus From The Movies
The “king of the tyrant lizards” will always be one of the scariest and deadliest dinosaurs around with a bite force three times that of a great white shark – making it the strongest bite force of any land animal that has ever lived.
Armed with powerful jaws and sharp teeth, tyrannosaurs were built to kill. But they were also built for something else, researchers say: speed.
As if giant, toothy dinosaurs weren’t scary enough, new evidence suggests tyrannosaurs were tailor-made for running. Even velociraptors, seen in “Jurassic Park” as gold-medal sprinters, weren’t so finely tuned for quickness, the new study concludes.
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Velociraptors “could drop down out of a tree and slash you apart,” says Eric Snively of the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse, who was not involved with the new study. But the new results, he says, “have shown that velociraptor and its relatives really were kind of pokey.”
The takedown of velociraptor started with an exhaustive survey of the fossilized legs of 50-plus species of carnivorous dinosaurs. Sizing up the legs of little dinos was easy. Getting a read on the gams of the big guys took a “ladder and a really long tape measure,” says study co-author Scott Persons, a graduate student at Canada’s University of Alberta.
Paleontologists unveiled in November a new dinosaur discovered four years ago in southern Utah that proves giant tyrant dinosaurs like the Tyrannosaurus rex were around 10 million years earlier than previously believed. The fossils were found in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in November 2009, and a team of paleontologists spent four years digging them up and traveling the world to confirm they were a new species. Paleontologists believe the dinosaur lived 80 million years ago in the late Cretaceous Period on a landmass in the flooded central region of North America.
Paleontologists unveiled in November a new dinosaur discovered four years ago in southern Utah that proves giant tyrant dinosaurs like the Tyrannosaurus rex were around 10 million years earlier than previously believed. The fossils were found in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in November 2009, and a team of paleontologists spent four years digging them up and traveling the world to confirm they were a new species. Paleontologists believe the dinosaur lived 80 million years ago in the late Cretaceous Period on a landmass in the flooded central region of North America. Show less
AUDREY ATUCHIN, NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM OF UTAH, VIA AP
Persons and his supervisor Philip Currie, also of the University of Alberta, analyzed the length of each animal’s lower leg – a key to swiftness – while taking into account the animal’s overall size. They found that some meat-eating dinos, though of massive proportions, had very long lower legs. Such leg dimensions allow an animal to cover more ground with each stride.
Among the standouts were the tyrannosaurs, a group that includes not only the famous Tyrannosaurus rex but also species like T. rex’s smaller cousin Gorgosaurus and its Asian look-alike Tarbosaurus, the researchers say in this week’s Scientific Reports.
“Tyrannosaurs as a group are the Radio City Rockettes of the meat-eating dinosaurs,” Persons says. “They’re super-leggy.” Leggiest of all was a lanky reptile that Persons thinks should be labeled Nanotyrannus, the species name some scientists give to a predator that looked like a small T. rex. Nanotyrannus, Persons says, was “the cheetah to T. rex’s lion.”
Not every scientist is convinced by the new findings. The idea behind the study is “really interesting,” says Kevin Middleton of the University of Missouri, and “they might be totally and completely right. But my view is we don’t know yet.” He’d like to see further analysis to verify the results.
Persons says his comparisons stand, and he also has another, more tangible piece of evidence for the swiftness of tyrannosaurs: the tracks of a tyrannosaur out for a walk, an extremely rare find. Persons and his colleagues describe the 66-million-year-old tracks, which meander across a stone slab in Wyoming, in a recent edition of Cretaceous Research.
The spacing of the footprints shows the animal was moving at a pace that for humans would be “a brisk walk … or maybe even a slow jog,” Persons said. That speed, he says, indicates a tyrannosaur would have no trouble catching up with something like a duckbill dinosaur, a plant-eater that would’ve made a nice tyrannosaur meal.
“If you had this dinosaur as a pet and you were walking it, you would get some pretty good exercise,” Snively says. Unlike velociraptor, “they definitely weren’t pokey.”
Nigersaurus is a genus of rebbachisaurid sauropod dinosaur that lived during the middle Cretaceous period, about 115 to 105 million years ago. It was discovered in the Elrhaz Formation in an area called Gadoufaoua, in the Republic of Niger.
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Fossils of this dinosaur were first described in 1976, but it was only named Nigersaurus taqueti in 1999, after further and more complete remains were found and described. The genus name means “Niger reptile”, and the specific name honours the palaeontologist Philippe Taquet, who discovered the first remains.
Small for a sauropod,Photo Right Nigersaurus was about 9 m (30 ft) long, and had a short neck. It weighed around 4 t (4.4 short tons), comparable to a modern elephant. Its skull was very specialised for feeding, with large fenestrae and thin bones. It had a wide muzzle filled with more than 500 teeth, which were replaced at a rapid rate: around every 14 days. The jaws may have borne a keratinous sheath. Unlike other tetrapods, the tooth-bearing bones of its jaws were rotated transversely relative to the rest of the skull, so that all of its teeth were located far to the front. Its skeleton was highly pneumatised (filled with air spaces connected to air sacs), but the limbs were robustly built.
Nigersaurus and its closest relatives are grouped within the subfamily Rebbachisaurinae (formerly thought to be grouped in the eponymous Nigersaurinae) of the family Rebbachisauridae, which is part of the sauropod superfamily Diplodocoidea. Nigersaurus was probably a browser, and fed with its head close to the ground. The region of its brain that detected smell was underdeveloped, although its brain size was comparable to that of other dinosaurs. There has been debate on whether its head was habitually held downwards, or horizontally like other sauropods. It lived in a riparian habitat, and its diet probably consisted of soft plants, such as ferns, horsetails, and angiosperms. It is one of the most common fossil vertebrates found in the area, and shared its habitat with other dinosaurian megaherbivores, as well as large theropods and crocodylomorphs.