According to a group of American researchers, billions of Tyrannosaurus rex (T.rex) tyrannosaurs were present in North America during their peak period as top predators.
Billions of T. rex have been wandering North America, a group of experts say. Although not a simple task, paleontologists from the University of California (USA) gave the T. rex dinosaur numbers in the Cretaceous period 65 – 98 million years ago. Challenging work Fossils have long been used to improve our understanding of extinct creatures like dinosaurs, but experts suggest that these skeletons are used to calculate densities and levels. Their abundance is a challenge. Director Charles Marshall of the University of California’s Museum of Paleontology is part of the research team. “There is no information available to make an estimate,” he said. If you find an Easter egg in your garden, how do you estimate how many Easter eggs ever existed? It simply cannot be done. You need information from somewhere else, for example, the density of the Easter eggs, how many years they can be found and how many Easter eggs have been placed in the garden. Paleontologist Nizar Ibrahim at the University of Portsmouth (UK) is not involved in the study. “Previously researchers tried to estimate things like the size of the Tyrannosaurus’ habitable area and their basic energy needs, so this is an extension of the work,” he said. before that, including many updates about Tyrannosaurus ”. There are 20,000 T.rex dinosaurs in North America T.rex is predicted to have a lifespan of 28 years. Using fossil records, densities and data from climate models, the University of California team calculated that about 20,000 adult T. rex, living across North America, could exist at the same time. . In a study published in the Journal of Science, researchers say this means that about 2.5 billion T. rex have lived and died over a period of nearly 2.5 million years – a process The dinosaurs live. For the first time, the team also calculated the lifespan of dinosaurs. Using scientific literature and expert opinion, they estimated T.rex’s adult age to be 15.5 years and its lifespan could reach around 28 years. The average adult body weight of this dinosaur is about 5,200 kg and a growth after maturity can make them weigh up to 7,000 kg. From the above estimates, the team concluded that each generation of T.rex lasted for about 19 years and there was a dinosaur for every 100 square kilometers. They determined that, with 20,000 permanent dinosaurs and about 127,000 generations of this species, there would be about 2.5 billion T.rex overall. “The researchers’ approach seems informative, while also pointing to current limits on what can be done,” said Jason C.Poole of the Bighorn Institute of Paleontology (USA). learned from the known “. “I’m sure it opens the door to better focus on questions about population density and what it means over time. So this can really help us understand how animals change over time as it is related to evolution and changing ecosystems, ”said Mr. Poole. The researchers estimated that the population density of T. rex was equivalent to 3,800 carnivorous dinosaurs in an area the size of California, but only 2 in an area the size of Washington DC. . Open up the possibility of finding more information A T.rex dinosaur could have an average weight of 5.2 tons. Meanwhile, the results also allow the authors to determine that only about 1 in 80 million T. rex is preserved as fossil remains. “The big impact of this study may be how rare the fossils are, they represent only a fraction of the individual organisms that ever existed, not to mention the depth of time and the rate. it happened in a few thousand to a million years, ”Mr. Poole said. Study co-author Professor Marshall of the University of California said, “In a way, this is a paleontological exercise of what we can know and how we can know what. there… It’s amazing what we know about this dinosaur so we can calculate more information.Our understanding of T. rex has expanded greatly over the decades. Through more fossils, more analytical methods and better ways of integrating information through known fossils ”. Mr Ibrahim sees other possibilities stemming from this study. There is a lot we don’t know about T.rex’s physiology, behavior, and food environment, he said, but this study offers an interesting approach to estimating abundance and prevalence. conservation of dinosaurs. “I would love to see it apply to the other dinosaurs we know from fossils. Looking at a wide range of dinosaurs, predators and prey, we can better compare dinosaur animal communities to modern ones, ”he said. What we see is superficial, according to Ibrahim, and even with this fascinating research, there is still a long way to go for us to confidently apply these approaches widely in research. save dinosaurs.
You must log in to post a comment.