Posted on 04/15/2021 3:46:54 PM PDT by nickcarraway
A total of 2.5 billion Tyrannosaurus rex probably existed during the lifespan of the species, researchers have calculated – suggesting that very few survived as fossils.
Charles Marshall at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues used body mass and population density to estimate how many T. rex once lived.
Larger animals tend to have a larger individual range, because they need more food to support their body mass than smaller animals, meaning body mass is inversely correlated with population density – a rule known as Damuth’s law.
Previous analysis of T. rex fossils shows that the average body mass of an adult was about 5200 kilograms. The team also used climate models and the locations of T. rex remains to estimate that the total geographic range of the species was about 2.3 million square kilometres across North America.
Using these figures and data from living species, the team estimated that there was around one T. rex for every 100 square kilometres in North America. “This would mean there was about 20,000 adult T. rex at any given time,” says Marshall.
Previous research shows T. rex lived into its late 20s and, using this figure, the team estimates that 2.5 billion T. rex spanning 127,000 generations graced our planet between 69 and 66 million years ago, the lifespan of the species.
Estimates of population size for long-extinct animals are rare because there are so few fossils. This estimate for adult T. rex suggests a very low fossil incidence rate – it would mean only one in 80 million T. rex survived as fossilised remains.
“This question has been in my head for years,” says Marshall. “I would ask the question every time I held a fossil in my hand.”
(Excerpt) Read more at newscientist.com ...
We have no idea how many fossils have yet to be located. There’s an awful lot of ground that hasn’t been examined. 70 million years ago, the land mass of the earth looked quite different than today.
Sounds like some “scientists” are pulling numbers out of their ass.
Even if true the information has no practical value.
Some are still around - Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters.
Fuzzy math...
Every time a modern day scientist opens their mouth about Dinosaurs, the Biblical account of the flood is about the only logical conclusion one can make about these fossils.
Information just for information’s sake is far better than the ignorance you seem to be promoting.
The more we learn about the past, the better prepared we are to meet the future.
The only group that thinks the way your post came across are the radical muslims. They think that if it isn’t in the koran, it doesn’t matter and should be destroyed.
Proof? The Taliban and the Buddhas. Read ANYTHING put forward by the mullahs. Ignorance writ large.
Even if what these scientists posit is incorrect, it gives us a starting point to learn from and either prove or disprove their thesis.
Real science is putting forward an idea and then trying to DISPROVE it.
2.5 billion animals over 3 million years is NOT VERY MANY, btw. That works out to less than 8500 critters alive in any given year, and fossilization is a vanishingly rare event.
#24 re “Bang A Gong” by T-Rex. Marc Bolan should have gotten a helluva lot of royalties because of all those T-Rexs’ name rights he would have gotten for the song title.
T-Rexs were nasty but not very smart re the issue of “trademarks” and “patent rights”.
Leaving Gorn out of the equation (he forgot to duck), you are on to something very important. Many years ago I talked to one of the top T-Rex paleontologists in the US, from the Un. of Colorado (besides Peter Franz who I knew here in the DC area)..
I’ve forgotten his name but he was featured in a National Geographic issue on the subject of dinosaurs, esp. the T-Rex (TR).
I asked him how many other dinosaurs a TR would have to eat a year in order to survive. The best he could postulate was that a TR group of a certain size would need a feeding-group of 10,000 vegetarian dinos to eat from. These might include the Tricerotops, Stegasaurus, Brontosaurus (id Diplodocus etc. grouping), smaller Coelophysus (I have knuckle finger bone from one I found in Landover, Md - the Smithsonian said it might have been about 6 feet tall or less). From where I come from re a BBQ, it would have been known as an “appetizer” back then).
The dinosaur range of the vegetarians would probably never have supported enough of them for 3 million years or so, to feed 2.5 Billion T-Rexs.
Right now, all we have are T-Rex bodies from a specific limited geographical area/range, say the Black Hills or those in Dinosaur National Park, Col.,on which to speculate and I mean speculate. Triassic Redbeds and even the Cretaceous/Paleocene sandbeds were full of enough iron to help preserve T Rex bodies if they were covered soon after death with deep layers of sediments. If there were billions of them, there would be a lot more bodies found in geographical concentrations around high-vegetarian areas where plant-eaters lived too.
Remember meat-eaters have been found in Alberta Canada formations, perhaps in Artic formations and even in the tip of Patagonia, Argentina to the Antarctic mainland, so there were a lot of dinos around, but just how many could survive in a group in any single location is pure conjecture right now).
#28. Come to the Congress in DC. You’ll find plenty of dinosaurs and their poop (Coprolites) in the toilets of Congress.
Just look at Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA). She has to be from the very dangerous dinosaur family/species “Magna Coprolites Mick Jagger Lipsasuckerous”.
Bwah ha ha. That was good.
A Tyrannosaurus in every pot. Now there’s a campaign promise I could support.
How many Democrats have ever lived on earth? Just asking for a friend.
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