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.
FORT WAYNE â In their first loss of the season Thursday, Eastsideâs softball team registered just six hits against Prairie Heights.
They collected that many hits in the fifth inning alone Saturday, blistering the North Side Legends 20-6 in a nonconference game that finished before the raindrops fell.
Every Blazer batter had at least one hit as the visitors racked up 17 hits in a game that was called after five innings because of the 10-run rule.
Junior Mataya Bireley collected four hits â a triple and three singles â and drove in five runs for the Blazers (12-1).
Freshman Jayci Kitchen and sophomore Grace Kreischer knocked in four runs each. Kitchen had a triple and a single while scoring three times. Kreischer brought in two on a sacrifice fly in the second and drove in another with a sacrifice fly in the fourth.
About 20,000 adult
Tyrannosaurus rexes probably lived at any one time, give or take a factor of 10, a new study suggests.
The number is in the ballpark of what most researchers guessed, but what’s few paleontologists had fully grasped, says Charles Marshall, is what that means: some 2.5 billion lived and died over the approximately 2 1/2 million years the dinosaur walked the Earth.
Until now, no one has been able to compute population numbers for long-extinct animals, and George Gaylord Simpson, one of the most influential paleontologists of the last century, felt that it couldn’t be done.
“When I hold a fossil in my hand, I can’t help wondering at the improbability that this very beast was alive millions of years ago…”
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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.