The big idea
During 2.4 million years of existence on Earth, a total of 2.5 billion
To estimate population, our team of paleontologists and scientists had to combine the extraordinarily comprehensive existing research on
From microscopic growth patterns in bones, researchers inferred that
T. rexfirst mated at around 15 years old. With growth records, scientists can also generate survivorship curves – an estimate of a
T. rex generations took 19 years. Finally,
T. rex existed as a species for 1.2 to 3.6 million years. With all of this information, we calculate that
T. rex existed for 66,000 to 188,000 generations.
From the fossil record alone, we had generated a