See a Tyrannosaurus rexWhether it is fictional or petrified is an unforgettable event. In fact, the “King” dino leaves such an indelible impression that you can even cite one specific example when you hear the name T. rex. But a new study estimates that the massive, bipedal predators were not so rare. On the contrary, the study pinpointed the number T. rex which once roamed the Earth by 2.5 billion.
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Gizmodo reported on the new study that UC Berkeley paleontologist Charles Marshall conducted on a whim. Marshall, who collaborated with some of his students for the study published in the journal Science, said in a UC Berkeley press release that he originally wanted to know how likely it is to find dinosaur fossils. (For no specific reason.)
“The project started in a way just like a lion’s,” Marshall said in the press release. ‘If I hold a fossil in my hand, I can not help [wonder] with the improbability that this very animal lived millions of years ago, and here I am holding a part of its skeleton …[and the] a question keeps popping into my head: ‘How unlikely is that?’
We counted T. rex.
In our new paper (link in thread) we develop a method to learn from fossil data and ecological laws about extinct species. There were ~ 20,000 T. rex at a time and the total number that ever lived was 2.5 billion.
Feel free to check – and dm me if you need a copy! pic.twitter.com/gSnOqKg77o
– Ashley W Poust (@AshPoust) 15 April 2021
To find out the probability, Marshall and his student team focused on it. T. rex, which seeks a figure for its population size during a particular year of its existence. As well as a model for the total number T. rex who wandered around the earth during the Cretaceous; the period that lasted from 145 to 66 million years ago.
According to the models of Marshall and his team, 20,000 adults T. rex probably roamed together at some point in their history. According to the researchers, each of the 40-foot-long, 14,000-pound reptiles needed about 40 square miles of land. And that they would have a total of 900,000 square miles of the North American continent to wander around.
Evolution number9
Assuming a generation length of 19 years and a species lifespan of 2.5 million years, that means 2.5 billion T. rex in total the earth wandered about. And that’s not even counting the youths.
Unfortunately, Marshall and his team admit that there is a wide margin of error for their estimate. According to the researchers, they can overestimate the number by a factor of up to 100; the accuracy of the estimate depends on T. rextrue true mass and population density. However, if the number is correct for each T. rex fossil we have found so far, there should be 80 million more. Although we are sure that the asteroid that kills erased many of the bones.