Tyrannosaurus Rex

 

Above is a pic and article on T-rex from a favorite book when I was a child. I was going to make a blog post on this, but I got lazy Correction, I got over being lazy).

. Still, this is how Tyrannosaurus was seen back then, and the thing is, it was really much more terrifying, as it was fast and ferocious. The book says it "waddled", and we now know that T-rex did not waddle. I have another book that says daspletosaurus may have "waddled" slowly like a duck". How could that have been, since it was built totally different--for relative speed, in fact? John Ostrom, who famously discovered deinonychus, and first proposed the idea that some dinosaurs were warm-blooded (the whole notion of warm-bloodedness was taking hold at the time, but still most books remained out of date), compared t-rex to a elephant in size and metabolism. This was in an issue of American Scientist, where he disagreed with Robert Bakker's proposal that T-Re could run as fast as a racehorse. This is likely an error on Bakker's part. Still, an elephant, though an endotherm, is herbivorous, and built to eat in a slow leisurely fashion. Not to run down prey. And tyrannosaurus undoubtedly did this, as we now know from bones of hadrosaurs bearing rex tooth marks, that also show signs of healing.

No, in other words he wasn't a scavenger, as others like Jack Horner proposed. And just look his actual build again. And there is the fact that the majority of habitual scavengers in nature aren't that big. The small purple ornithomimus, who, in the pic, has run off with piece of flesh--well, that's a scavenger! Also, if T-Rex wasn't the apex predator of his environment back then, what was?

Once, Dougal Dixon, the famous originator of spec zoology, thought T-rex was entirely a scavenger, and he said so in a couple of books I own written by him. But Dixon changed his tune, once new evidence was brought to light regarding T-rex's predatory nature. Horner, last time I checked anyway, refused to change and kept on insisting the opposite.

Now, its true that not everyone is too enthusiastic about the "scavenger" possibility. Most of us are biased toward T-rex as a predator, whether we happen to be right or wrong. We just happened to luck on with T-rex. Horner, though, is reputed (correct me if I'm wrong on this) to have once said that "he didn't like tyrannosaurus", so it's just possible he's purposefully challenging popular opinion. To the point it seems, of going against science!

Giant winged scavengers, though--that's something else: