Seeing a Tyrannosaurus rex– whether fictitious or fossilized – is a memorable event. In fact, the dino of the “King” leaves such an indelible impression, you can even remember a special example when you hear the name T. rex. But a new study estimates that massive, bipedal predators were not so rare. On the contrary, the study fixes the number of T. rex who ever roamed the Earth with 2.5 billion.
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Gizmodo reported on the new study, which UC Berkeley paleontologist Charles Marshall performed on a whim. Marshall, who teamed up with some of his students for the study published in the journal Science, said in a UC Berkeley press release that it initially wanted to know how likely it is to find dinosaur fossils. (No special reason.)
“The project just started out as weird, in a way,” Marshall said in a news release. “When I hold a fossil in my hand, I can’t help it [wonder] to the improbability of the fact that this beast was alive millions of years ago, and here I keep part of its skeleton …[and the] the question popped into my head, “How unlikely is it?”
I counted T. rex.
In our new paper (link in thread) we develop a method to find out about extinct species from fossil data and ecological laws. There were ~ 20,000 T. rex at one time and the total number that ever lived was 2.5 billion.
Check – and dm me if you need a copy! pic.twitter.com/gSnOqKg77o
– Ashley W Poust (@AshPoust) April 15, 2021
To find out this probability, Marshall and his team of students focused on T. rex, looking for a figure for the size of its population during a given year of existence. As well as a model for the total number of T. rex who roamed the Earth during the Cretaceous; the era that lasted from 145 to 66 million years ago.
According to the models of Marshall and his team, 20,000 adults T. rex they probably traveled together at any point in their history. The researchers estimate that each of the 40-meter-long, 14,000-kilogram reptiles would have needed about 40 square miles of land. And that he would have a total of 900,000 square miles of the North American continent to walk on.
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Assuming a generational length of 19 years and a lifespan of the species of 2.5 million years, this would mean 2.5 billion T. rex in total they roamed the Earth. And that doesn’t take minors into account either.
Unfortunately, Marshall and his team acknowledge that there is a wide margin of error for their estimation. Researchers say it could overestimate the number by a factor of up to 100; the accuracy of the estimation depends on T. rexthe true average mass and population density. If the number is correct, however, for each T. rex the fossils we’ve found so far should be another 80 million. Although we’re sure the asteroid that killed the dino wiped out a lot of bones.