How many Tyrannosaurus rexes roamed North America during the Cretaceous period?
That s a question Charles Marshall pestered his paleontologist colleagues with for years until he finally teamed up with his students to find an answer.
What the team found, published this month in the journal Science, is that about 20,000 adult T. rexes probably lived at any one time, give or take a factor of 10, which is in the ballpark of what most of his colleagues guessed.
What few paleontologists had fully grasped, he said, including himself, is that this means that some 2.5 billion lived and died over the approximately 2 1/2 million years the dinosaur walked the earth.
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2.5 Billion Tyrannosaurus Rexes Roamed North America over a Period of 2.5 Million Years Over approximately 2.5 million years, North America likely hosted 2.5 billion Tyrannosaurus rexes, a minuscule proportion of which have been dug up and studied by paleontologists, according to a UC Berkeley study.
Image by Julius Csotonyi, courtesy of Science magazine
How many Tyrannosaurus rexes roamed North America during the Cretaceous period?
That’s a question Charles Marshall pestered his paleontologist colleagues with for years until he finally teamed up with his students to find an answer.
What the team found, to be published this week in the journal Science, is that about 20,000 adult T. rexes probably lived at any one time, give or take a factor of 10, which is in the ballpark of what most of his colleagues guessed.
How many T rexes were there? Billions - ScienceBlog com scienceblog.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from scienceblog.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Analysis of what’s known about the dinosaur leads to conclusion there were 2.5 billion over time.
How many Tyrannosaurus rexes roamed North America during the Cretaceous period?
That’s a question Charles Marshall pestered his paleontologist colleagues with for years until he finally teamed up with his students to find an answer.
What the team found, to be published this week in the journal
Science, is that about 20,000 adult T. rexes probably lived at any one time, give or take a factor of 10, which is in the ballpark of what most of his colleagues guessed.
What few paleontologists had fully grasped, he said, including himself, is that this means that some 2.5 billion lived and died over the approximately 2 1/2 million years the dinosaur walked the earth.
Credit: Julius Csotonyi, courtesy of Science magazine
Over approximately 2.5 million years, North America likely hosted 2.5 billion Tyrannosaurus rexes, a minuscule proportion of which have been dug up and studied by paleontologists, according to a UC Berkeley study.
How many Tyrannosaurus rexes roamed North America during the Cretaceous period?
That’s a question Charles Marshall pestered his paleontologist colleagues with for years until he finally teamed up with his students to find an answer.
What the team found, to be published this week in the journal Science, is that about 20,000 adult T. rexes probably lived at any one time, give or take a factor of 10, which is in the ballpark of what most of his colleagues guessed.