A hundred fossilized specimens of tyrannosaurs have so far been found, of which only 32 are adults, but there must have been many more. But how many more? Charles Marshall, director of the University of California Museum of Paleontology, asked this in an article published by Science. Eventually he came to a conclusion: the tyrannosaurs that have appeared on Earth in their entire evolutionary history were probably 2,500,000,000 (2.5 billion).
The living space
Obviously they didn’t all live together at the same time, also because, Marshall calculated according to some ecological laws between body mass and necessary space, each tyrannosaurus needed a space estimated to be 110 square kilometers to survive. It means that in an area as large as the Municipality of Milan one or at most two could be encountered. At any given time, the T. Rex on Earth could not have been more than 20,000.
The report
From which Marshall and his team deduced another data: so far we have found only 1 fossilized specimen out of 80 million T. Rex lived. A very low ratio, but incomplete because one hopes sooner or later to find other finds. From which it follows that if the total number of tyrannosaurs had been lower, hardly a fossil would have been preserved and we would probably never have known of the existence of the rulers of the upper Cretaceous period. Then a little more than 66 million years ago one day (bad for them but beautiful for us mammals, otherwise we would not be here to tell these facts) an asteroid arrived and you change the world. But that’s another story.
April 17, 2021 (change April 17, 2021 | 4:45 pm)
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