You know how in dinosaur movies there’s a zoom out and there’s always heaps across the landscape…I wonder how dense the population actually was? Like was a T- Rex always starving because they hardly ever came across something to kill/eat, or was it a smorgasbord situation…?
This may not be true. Have you read The Hot Blooded Dinosaurs by Adrian J. Desmond? This posits that dinos (or a lot of them) had similar feeding requirements to predator animals today, as most of them were endothermic, not exothermic like reptiles. Crocs are reptiles and exothermic (most of them), and while they can generate body heat by shivering, there’s a strict limit to how much warmth that can generate.
The theory that Tyrannosaurus was purely a scavenger is is just plain wrong. While they would have eaten carcasses like any other predator, there is a ton of fossil evidence that shows Tyrannosaurus was very much an active predator. Dinosaurs were also warm blooded and would have needed to eat at much regular intervals than crocodiles
Did you actually read any of that? because it supports what I said that Tyrannosaurus was not a pure scavenger and provides multiple examples of how the scavenger hypothesis is wrong. Jack Horner’s hypothesis has been securely debunked both by fossil evidence on animals that would have been prey for tyrannosaurus and by what we can confidently ascertain from studying the biomechanics of Tyrannosaurs themselves. If you use modern predators as a example, none purely subsist off scavenging. All modern predators engage in both behaviours and it stands to reason that T-rex did the same.
10% rule. Predators form 5-10% of the population of their prey. For every 20 sauropods, there will be one or at most 2 T-Rexs. Most likely 1 adult and 1 juvenile. This ratio apparently holds good across the animal kingdom. Herbivores form 5-10% of the biomass of the fodder available at any given moment. If the biomass gives out, they migrate. As do their predators.
TIL a T Rex is an archosaur.
I was wondering the other day…
You know how in dinosaur movies there’s a zoom out and there’s always heaps across the landscape…I wonder how dense the population actually was? Like was a T- Rex always starving because they hardly ever came across something to kill/eat, or was it a smorgasbord situation…?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyrannosaurus#Population_estimates
the number of individuals living in an area the size of California could be as high as 3,800 animals,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feeding_behaviour_of_Tyrannosaurus
They were scavengers eating very large dinosaur carcasses . I’m going assume they were like crocs which ate at long intervals.
Right. So mostly starving then.
which is pretty normal in nature
This may not be true. Have you read The Hot Blooded Dinosaurs by Adrian J. Desmond? This posits that dinos (or a lot of them) had similar feeding requirements to predator animals today, as most of them were endothermic, not exothermic like reptiles. Crocs are reptiles and exothermic (most of them), and while they can generate body heat by shivering, there’s a strict limit to how much warmth that can generate.
I’ve read the books by Horner and i did link to his writings about T Rex.
The theory that Tyrannosaurus was purely a scavenger is is just plain wrong. While they would have eaten carcasses like any other predator, there is a ton of fossil evidence that shows Tyrannosaurus was very much an active predator. Dinosaurs were also warm blooded and would have needed to eat at much regular intervals than crocodiles
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feeding_behaviour_of_Tyrannosaurus#Scavenging
Did you actually read any of that? because it supports what I said that Tyrannosaurus was not a pure scavenger and provides multiple examples of how the scavenger hypothesis is wrong. Jack Horner’s hypothesis has been securely debunked both by fossil evidence on animals that would have been prey for tyrannosaurus and by what we can confidently ascertain from studying the biomechanics of Tyrannosaurs themselves. If you use modern predators as a example, none purely subsist off scavenging. All modern predators engage in both behaviours and it stands to reason that T-rex did the same.
10% rule. Predators form 5-10% of the population of their prey. For every 20 sauropods, there will be one or at most 2 T-Rexs. Most likely 1 adult and 1 juvenile. This ratio apparently holds good across the animal kingdom. Herbivores form 5-10% of the biomass of the fodder available at any given moment. If the biomass gives out, they migrate. As do their predators.
Yeah, but 20 sauropods across what area is what I’m getting at…20 every square km, or 20 every 100 square km?
Most like 20 sauropods wandered around over 200 sq km of rangeland, then migrated.
My understanding is that it was basically a giant lizard charcuterie board.
T Rx was not equipped to predate animals, they were equipped to crunch’em