If that doesn’t give Hollywood permission to go even further in the next one, Jurassic Park movie, I don’t know.
A new study, which an Ottawa scientist and a British colleague initiated during the COVID-19 lockdown, suggests dinosaurs may have been even bigger than previously thought.
Jordan Mallon, a paleobiologist at the Canadian Museum of Nature, and David Hone of Queen Mary University of London recently published their findings in the scientific journal Ecology and evolutionThe pair focused on Tyrannosaurus rex, though the results are intended to make you think about all dinosaurs.
Scientists concluded that the largest T. Rex member may have weighed as much as 15 metric tons, or more than 33,000 pounds — 70 percent heavier than previous estimates and as much as an entire school bus or two average male African elephants.
It could also be 25 percent longer, at 15 meters.
Mallon and Hone looked at known T. Rex fossils, then used the dimensions of living alligators (taking into account their large size and close relationship to dinosaurs) to use computer modeling to estimate how big the largest T. Rex would have been.
Their methodology was dictated by the relative rarity of available T. Rex fossils compared to other dinosaur species; on its own, such a small sample likely does not represent the largest T. Rex to walk the Earth.
But based on previous discoveries of giants from some modern animal species, “there must have been larger dinosaurs that haven’t been found yet,” the study suggests. Hence the comparison with alligators.
It’s also fun to think about a 15-ton T. Rex, Mallon added.
“It’s such a big animal to start with… T. Rex can teach us something about the limits of what it takes to be that kind of animal,” he said.
“Do they collapse under their own weight? Could an animal that large obtain enough food in that area to sustain itself?”
A useful new tool
Thomas Carr, director of the Institute of Paleontology at Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin, says Mallon and Hone’s hypothesis provides a useful point of reference for comparing future fossil discoveries.
“Our guesses about the maximum size of a given dinosaur species are likely wrong because the fossil record is incomplete,” Carr said.
He added that the growing number of fossils being collected by private collectors “isn’t really helpful.”
“Who knows? Perhaps among these private fossils is a test of the Jordan-David hypothesis.”
