More Tyrannosaur Stupidity

[Elfdart]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6720461.stm

BBC NEWS
T. rex was 'slow-turning plodder'
A Tyrannosaurus rex would have had great difficulty getting its jaws on fast, agile prey, a study confirms.

A US team has used detailed computer models to work out the weight of a typical "king of the dinosaurs", and determine how it ran and turned.

The results indicate a 6-8 tonne T. rex was unlikely to have topped 40km/h (25mph) and would have taken a couple of seconds to swivel 45 degrees.

The researchers report their findings in the Journal of Theoretical Biology.

They build on previous work detailing the biomechanics of the famous dinosaur, but add in new refinements.

"We've now got a pretty good estimate of its weight - over which there's been some controversy," lead author Dr John Hutchinson explained.

"We've shown there's no way it could weigh 3-4 tonnes as some people have suggested. It had to have weighed 6-8 tonnes," the scientist, who undertook the work at Stanford University, California, told BBC News.

Slowcoach dino

The team's computer modelling system estimated the centre of mass position and the inertia (resistance to turning), which have ramifications for how T. rex would have stood and moved and what it would have looked like.

As well as predicting the dinosaur's likely body mass and top speed (25-40km/h or 15-25mph), the computer calculations gave the team an idea of the turning ability of a T. rex . This has never been done before.

The study indicates the animal would have changed direction incredibly slowly due to its massive inertia, taking one or two seconds to make a quarter-turn.

The species certainly could not have pirouetted rapidly on one leg, as popular illustrations have sometimes pictured it, and other large dinosaurs, doing.

More agile prey would have given the slip to a marauding T. rex quite easily, it seems.

The researchers believe their work will help palaeontologist build up a more realistic picture of how the large dinosaurs lived.

"These were big clunky things - T. rex and the animals it probably preyed on. We have to slow down our view of that ecosystem," said Dr Hutchinson, who is currently lecturing in biomechanics at the Royal Veterinary College in the UK.

"It wasn't like the Serengeti today where everything is done at top speed."

Dr Paul Barrett, of London's Natural History Museum, commented: "This is another finding that undermines the kind of idea of T. rex as a super-predator.

"The main reason for that being it was a lot slower than we used to think it was; but it has this huge mouth filled with 60-odd, 30cm-long teeth, so it was still a formidable animal."
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/s ... 720461.stm

Published: 2007/06/04 23:12:55 GMT

© BBC MMVII

So it could only go up to 25mph.

Wolves aren't much faster at just over 30-35 mph, so I guess they're not predators, either. Wolves are also much slower than many of their prey animals, but still manage to hunt them anyway through ambushes and tracking with their superior sense of smell. Will this stupidity ever end?

Apparently not. A predator doesn't have to be able to run fast (though it helps) to hunt, less so when its prey can't run very fast, either. The horned dinosaurs are built to turn and pivot to shield themselves from enemies, while duckbills are little more than giant cows. Neither were built for speed. Tyrannosaurs didn't hunt gazelles, so whether they could run fast is irrelevant.

Why do so many paleontologists have their heads up their asses?

[Stark]

Wouldn't this only matter if they were significantly slower than similar-sized prey? Even then, if a predator can't subsist on weak/old/slow targets, it's not going to be very successful.

They don't talk about sprint-vs-sustained speed, either. I don't know jack about biomechanics, but is 25mph it's absolute top theoretical speed, or it's top speed without risking a heart attack like rhinos?

[Academia Nut]

Perhaps some of the more paleontological minded members of this board can fill me in, but weren't most of the primary prey species at that time rather slow. In fact, wasn't that time period characterized by most life forms being relatively slow in comparison to some of the speed freaks developed by small, hot blooded mammals in the past few million years?

Also, its probably a few years old, but I heard one theory whereby the juveniles were the chasers, moving the prey into the waiting jaws of the adults. Considering that the T. rex seems to have put all of its evolutionary energy into developing a bite of truly stupendous proportions, it seems reasonable that the animals would not have needed high speed when they are focused on delivering a single, devastating bite. Ambush tactics would seem suitable for such an attack method.

[Anguirus]

Being fair, this article isn't suggesting that tyrannosaurs lived only on carcasses. That seems to be mostly a bug up Horner's butt. The only thing this article really does is revise the mass of T. rex upward and remind stupid people that Jurassic Park was a movie.

I wonder if anyone has ever performed a biomechanical analysis of Daspletosaurus or Albertosaurus.

[Akhlut]

I still don't see why it couldn't be like a crocodile and just hide out, waiting for some idiot prey animal to stumble near it and having the T-rex lunge out and take out an enormous bite and let the animal bleed out.

Or, hell, it might do what a lot of canines and hyenas do: jog after faster prey until the faster prey collapses from exhaustion.

And if it was like a Komodo dragon, it might just need to get one bite in to kill prey, assuming it had a mouthful of horribly pathogenic bacteria, in which case it doesn't need to be all that fast, like a Komodo dragon. And it's huge size would mean that anything trying to move in on its kill would be easily intimidated.

Bah, I know paleontologists actually look at modern species with similar characteristics and make assumptions based on such things, why can't they do it for T-rex?

[Flagg]

Being fair, this article isn't suggesting that tyrannosaurs lived only on carcasses. That seems to be mostly a bug up Horner's butt. The only thing this article really does is revise the mass of T. rex upward and remind stupid people that Jurassic Park was a movie.

I wonder if anyone has ever performed a biomechanical analysis of Daspletosaurus or Albertosaurus.

Jurassic Park was pretty accurate about T-Rex capabilities, even with this study. Really, the only thing the movie conflicts with is the full out sprinting speed of a T-Rex, so the only scene that is inaccurate is the chase.

[Napoleon the Clown]

One problem with the croc/Komodo Dragon thing... Those are both small enough that they can be very fast lungers. A six ton animal, not so much.

The 25 mph figure's probably based off mechanical limits. The legs would be taking one hell of a pounding at even half that figure.

There's also a big difference between five to ten miles per hour. Not to mention wolves actually posses the intellect to hunt in packs, whereas t-rex may not have.

Then again, it probably did prey on slower moving animals. Thinking about it, they could very well have been ambush predators. If they were camoflaged and their prey had poor eyesight I can see them charging a 30 ton saraupod and breaking its neck with their massive maw.

Jurassic Park was pretty accurate about T-Rex capabilities, even with this study. Really, the only thing the movie conflicts with is the full out sprinting speed of a T-Rex, so the only scene that is inaccurate is the chase.

Um, it was fast enough to snag humans, raptors, and other agile targets. And it pulled a 180 in under two seconds. It made the bastard out to be more agile than a crocodile. That doesn't seem too accurate to what this study suggests.

[Flagg]

Jurassic Park was pretty accurate about T-Rex capabilities, even with this study. Really, the only thing the movie conflicts with is the full out sprinting speed of a T-Rex, so the only scene that is inaccurate is the chase.

Um, it was fast enough to snag humans, raptors, and other agile targets. And it pulled a 180 in under two seconds. It made the bastard out to be more agile than a crocodile. That doesn't seem too accurate to what this study suggests.

It attacked a gallimimus from the treeline and the raptor was not aware of the T-Rex until it was in its jaws, so both were effectively ambushed. The only 2 humans shown being directly injured or killed by the T-Rex were Genarro, who was not moving, and Malcolm, who appears to have been thrown into their air either by a kick or the head when destroying the hut. I don't recall seeing it spinning around or turning much.

[Ritterin Sophia]

The Wolf idea sounds pretty close, there's some that feel the family of the (now) second largest T-Rex specimen 'Sue' was killed by another Pack , and then there's the many other pack hunting, large Theropods like Allosaurus, Mapusaurus, Giganotosaurus.

[Covenant]

Regardless, the damn thing ate pretty well for it's day. You don't evolve to such a gigantic size with such a ridiculously massive jaw and bite complex by feeding off of carcasses and slow-moving elderly prey. If that's all T-Rex was capable of then it wouldn't have been able to advance, and keep advancing to it's point of evolution. There's the possibility that the thing was a big brawler, and would roll up on a kill and scare off any other predators. If it was the Dinosaur 'Don' with a few of it's kids acting as legbreakers, I could see these things taking care of business whenever something got brought down. Kinda like male lions with it comes to hyenas.

[Akhlut]

One problem with the croc/Komodo Dragon thing... Those are both small enough that they can be very fast lungers. A six ton animal, not so much.

A large crocodile can weigh nearly 2,000 pounds and there are extinct examples that are at least as large as a T-Rex (members of the Sarcosuchus genus could weigh up to 8,000 kilos).

There's also a big difference between five to ten miles per hour. Not to mention wolves actually posses the intellect to hunt in packs, whereas t-rex may not have.

Hard to say. They could have been fairly stupid animals otherwise, but if they had brains adapted to group hunting, they could hunt in groups. For instance, squirrels apparently can't learn that running in front of cars is a stupid move, but they can memorize the locations of hundreds of nut caches.

[Shroom Man 777]

Oh man, T-rex is slow. How can it possibly catch Triceratops or duckbills which can run faster than cheetas and are extremely lithe and agile?! And, gasp, how about sauropods, the fastest animals in god's six-thousand-year-old Earth!

Oh wait.

Fuck them. And fuck Spinosaurus too. T-rex forever.

[wolveraptor]

I can see them charging a 30 ton saraupod and breaking its neck with their massive maw.

I couldn't. T-rex didn't coexist with any sauropods as far as I know.[/nitpick]

T-rex's primary prey would've been large hadrosaurs and ceratopsians, neither of which are adapted for running. It didn't need to be fast to catch them, and unlike many predators of today, it actually matched its prey in size. One model for rex's predator behavior holds that it scared herds of such animls into flight, and then wounded them from behind by scooping a large section of flesh out of their backsides. The wounded animals soon bled to exhaustion, and the T-rex returned to finish its meal, much like a shark.

I've always been suspcious of low speed estimates for T-rex, if only because elephants, whose frames are one of the worst in the animal world for running, are able to reach 25 mph for short bursts. At a similar size, with a leaner, lither body, T-rex should be able to match that speed, if not exceed it. On the other hand, I can't argue with pure physics.

[Azazal]

Guess I'm crazy then. I always pictured the T-rex as being in line with the Great White. A slow cruiser that looks for the right time to strike, and when it did, it's a massive burst of speed that is used to deliver a crippling blow to the prey. Then it holds back and lets the prey bleed out, moves in for the easy final blow if needed. Hell, 10 years ago, would any one believe that a GW could leap out of the water enough to gets its entire body airborne.

We need to be able to make a clone of a T-rex dammit, see if they really do taste like chicken while we're at it.

[Darth Raptor]

Being fair, this article isn't suggesting that tyrannosaurs lived only on carcasses. That seems to be mostly a bug up Horner's butt.

And it's nothing more than attention whoring. He can't honestly believe that a six tonne, warm-blooded, TERRESTRIAL CARNIVORE can subsist entirely on carrion. The largest endotherms to scavenge exclusively are condors, and that's only because they can FLY (i.e., are able to cover the vast amounts of territory necessary to find all that food). Either that or Horner needs to stick to the eggs, nests and babies and leave the ecology to people who aren't fucking retarded. AFAIK, he doesn't cling to the perception of dinosaurs as giant reptiles, either. Instead, he was at the forefront of the reassesment that realized and popularized the notion that most dinosaurs enjoyed a mammalian/avian metabolism.

I couldn't. T-rex didn't coexist with any sauropods as far as I know.

Nitpicking your nitpick: Towards the end of the Cretaceous, titanosaurid sauropods from South America had begun migrating as far north as Wyoming. That doesn't really change your point about tyrannosaurs preying almost exclusively on hadrosaurs and ceratopsians, though. Tyrannosaurs were built very differently from allosaurs, which were the sauropod specialists.

[Big Orange]

Instead, he was at the forefront of the reassesment that realized and popularized the notion that most dinosaurs enjoyed a mammalian/avian metabolism.

I thought that dinosaurs were mainly reptile but birds generally descended from them and some non sauropods had bone structures that were somewhat similar to modern birds - for all we know the T-Rex could've been covered in scaly feathers (but T-Rex just being a scavanger sounds quite lame).

[wolveraptor]

[quote="Big Orange"]*snip*[quote]Dinosaurs were all reptiles (in fact, technically, all birds are reptiles too). Raptor is just talking about their high, birdlike metabolisms.

I heard once that Maniraptorids might be descendents of Archaeopteryx (which I heard shared the Dromaeosaurid's distinctive retractable 2nd toe claw), making them effectively birds. Should I give any credence to that theory?

[petesampras]

Wolves aren't much faster at just over 30-35 mph, so I guess they're not predators, either. Wolves are also much slower than many of their prey animals, but still manage to hunt them anyway through ambushes and tracking with their superior sense of smell. Will this stupidity ever end?

This is a shitty analogy. Wolves are highly intelligent animals that hunt in packs.

[Covenant]

Wolves aren't much faster at just over 30-35 mph, so I guess they're not predators, either. Wolves are also much slower than many of their prey animals, but still manage to hunt them anyway through ambushes and tracking with their superior sense of smell. Will this stupidity ever end?

This is a shitty analogy. Wolves are highly intelligent animals that hunt in packs.

There's evidence that T-Rex hunted in family units too, at least while there were young.

Also, there's evidence from the holes in the bones to suggest a wide variety of dinosaurs were not only warm-blooded but remarkably similar to birds in metabolism. So they're not mainly like lizards, they're mainly like birds. If you think about it, the bird/lizard split had happened a long time ago during the Age of Reptiles where this new 'dinosaur' thing became the hot shit of the world. Fast and active predators were a big deal, and a lot of the purely lizardlike critters slid back to being gigantic lake-dwelling things that ambushed stuff while the wide open spaces were mostly ruled by the faster moving and more adaptable dinosaur chassis.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5166518.stm

This article details not only how dinosaurs were able to regulate their own body temperature, but also an unforseen consequence. Without heat sinks, they really ran the risk of overheating. So as they aged, many dinosaurs may have simply grown out of warmbloodedness, and used the massive heat-retention of their own bodies to keep them going. This suggests that large dinosaurs like T-Rex may have been incredibly active and agile youths (especially due to the raptorlike build of a baby T-Rex) and only slowed down their metabolism as their bodies grew to offset the heat loss.

So there's plenty of evidence for the 'Fast Dino' theory, even for things like T-Rex. While it may have been limited by physics on how fast it can go, I doubt a Hadrosaur was going anywhere either, especially if it couldn't deal with overheating. Like a Bulldog or other poorly-designed critters, some of these dinosaurs might have had terrible mid-day endurance. T-Rex going coldblooded may have given it at edge in daylight chases, instead of pushing it's core temperature dangerously high.

[starfury]

I heard once that Maniraptorids might be descendents of Archaeopteryx (which I heard shared the Dromaeosaurid's distinctive retractable 2nd toe claw), making them effectively birds. Should I give any credence to that theory?

You Should, I helps to explain What happens to all those Proto-Birds that Disappeared in the end of the Juarssic and Was soon replaced by Real Birds during the Cretecaous, The rise of Raptors and other related groups rising out of those said proto-birds.

And it's nothing more than attention whoring. He can't honestly believe that a six tonne, warm-blooded, TERRESTRIAL CARNIVORE can subsist entirely on carrion. The largest endotherms to scavenge exclusively are condors, and that's only because they can FLY (i.e., are able to cover the vast amounts of territory necessary to find all that food). Either that or Horner needs to stick to the eggs, nests and babies and leave the ecology to people who aren't fucking retarded. AFAIK, he doesn't cling to the perception of dinosaurs as giant reptiles, either. Instead, he was at the forefront of the reassesment that realized and popularized the notion that most dinosaurs enjoyed a mammalian/avian metabolism.

And of Course for this to Work, He would Have to apply it to all the other Large Theropods as well, all of which were Even more Poorly built for Running compared to rather Agile Tyranosaurs. His much Touted Raptors actually were Far More Unsuited to long Distance Chases then the Tyransosaurs and it's Cousins with their Long Ostrich Like Limbs.

[wolveraptor]

His much Touted Raptors actually were Far More Unsuited to long Distance Chases then the Tyransosaurs and it's Cousins with their Long Ostrich Like Limbs.

To be fair, not many predator species utilize the long-distance method of the canids. You won't find anything like them among insects, fish, birds, or reptiles, as far as I know. They're rather unique.

[starfury]

To be fair, not many predator species utilize the long-distance method of the canids. You won't find anything like them among insects, fish, birds, or reptiles, as far as I know. They're rather unique.

Which I again Find ironic, as the Canids tend to much more Generalist then the Various Specialized Guilds of Ambush Predators, Such as the Big Cats, the Various Saber-tooths and Most Large Theropods.

Even the Large Sharks tend to be Mostly Ambush, with only Mako being even close to a True Long-Distance Purisist Predator.

[Stark]

Ugh, why does he capitalise like he's writing a fucking comic book? Stop that.

Large contemporary predators can often subsist by stealing the kills of other predators, so even if the Rex magically can't catch anything himself, he can sure scare people away from their kills.

[Darth Yoshi]

I heard once that Maniraptorids might be descendents of Archaeopteryx (which I heard shared the Dromaeosaurid's distinctive retractable 2nd toe claw), making them effectively birds. Should I give any credence to that theory?

The way I understand it, birds, dromaeosaurs, and their ilk are all classified into a single group within Reptilia.

[Anguirus]

All of taxonomy is educated guess-work, but that's fairly credible. I doubt very much that the maniraptors are direct descendents of Archaeopteryx (which appears to be a bit of an evolutionary dead-end), but they may well be closely related. The interesting thing is that the dromaeosaurs have several skeletal features that are much closer to modern birds than the equivalent features of Archaeopteryx. So if we think of Archaeopteryx as being a bird (as opposed to a non-avian dinosaur) then it begs the question of why we consider dromaeosaurs non-avian dinosaurs. For all we know, they could have been totally feathered, as well.