Have you ever thought about dinosaurs? Like which dinosaur was the biggest, or smallest, how many teeth did they have, what color were dinosaur, who or what species was plant eaters, meateaters, what about if they lived today could we as humans live with them, would we be their food or have them as pets.
Well no one knows about the color of their skin. Animal skin colors are produced by organic pigments which are not preserved in fossilization. By using modernday reptiles, and other animals as a guide has helped guess about dinosaur coloration, For example an animal that was hunted may need camouflage to hide from predators or brightly colored to look like a poisonous species. Even using today’s science it is impossible to know the coloration. (Enchantedlearning.com)
There are over 500 genera that have been found, name and scientifically proven. Plenty of new genera names have been found in recent years that is not Nomen Nudem. The ICZN (the International Committee on Zoological Nomenclature) tells the world if a creature is a new genus or not.(Zoom Dinosaurs) Geologist have only discovered less than half of the dinosaurs that lived on earth. This was very surprising to me because there are many different dinosaurs that are already known to everyone. All dinosaurs do not become fossils. To think that it is so many dinosaurs that we will never know about is very unfortunate. Therefore, we will never know how many different dinosaurs that actually walked the earth. Nor will we ever know the total population of the dinosaurs. (Zoom Dinosaurs)
According to zoomdinosaurs.com there are over 1,000 different species of dinosaurs. These creatures can be found everywhere across the world by extant species and fossils. (Zoom Dinosaurs)
Let’s talk about one of the largest popular dinosaur their ever was. No not Godzilla, nor Barney it's, Tyrannosaurus Rex. By far the most popular dinosaur still to this date. I can remember when I was in kindergarten, and we would fight over who would play with the T. rex toy. The reason we fought over the T.rex toy was because we were taught in class that it was the biggest and baddest dinosaur of all time. T.rex stands for Tyrannosaurus rex.
According to livescience.com “The name T yrannosaurus r ex means “king of the tyrant lizards”, “tyranno” means tyrant in Greek, “saurus”, means lizard in Greek and “rex” means “king” in Latin” (livescience.com)
The first fossils of T yrannosaurus rex were discovered by Edward Drinker. The year of 1892 he found Manospondylus Gigas, which means roughly as “Giant Thin Vertebra”, in retrospect, because they were only classified years later after the event, as various T.
T. Rex’s fragments were discovered before 1892. Scattered teeth in Colorado, in 1874, and skull fragments in Wyoming around 1890.
Barnum Brown who was named after the circus impresario P.T. Barnum, changed the name of Manospondylus, in 1905 the president of Brown’s Museum, Henry Fairfield Osborn, officially named this dinosaur T yrannosaurus rex. (Dinosaurs.about.com) (livescience.com)
T y r a n n o s a u r s i s a g e n u s o f t h e r o p o d d i n o s a u r . T y r a n n o s a u r u s r e x i s o n e o f t h e l a r g e s t theropods that ever lived , from Alberta to Texas, which long time ago was an Island Continent known as Laramidia. It’s possible that T. rex was an invasive species from Asia, according to a 2016 study published in Scientific Reports. Fossils of the T.rex were found in a lot of different rocks going back further than 69 million years. The researchers said perhaps T. rex crossed over about 67 million years ago when the seaway between Asia and North American receded. However other experts maintain that T. rex evolved in North America. (Joseph Castro)
(Livescience.com)(ScienceViews)
The physical makeup of the T.rex
The T yrannosaurus r ex was very large. The T.rex could grow up to be close to 40 feet long and 20 feet high. Even for today standards that is a very big animal. T. rex had an S curve neck that was muscular and short, like most dinosaurs. His head alone was could get as big as 5 feet. It also had big eyes to help hunt for food. T. rex could also see the relative distance of an object in one field vision. Most dinosaurs that were hunters had this gift to help the find food. The ones that eat plants usually have eyes on the side of there head so they can spot animals from all sides that are coming to eat them. T. rex had very large feet that were similar looking to birds. Their legs was very powerful that allowed them to run fast.
(Dinosaurfacts.org)(ZoomDinosaurs.com).
Tyrannosaurus tail was very long and pointy. The tail helped him have balance. If he did not have this long pointed tail, then he would be unbalanced and be tipped forward because his head was so heavy. Having a big head sometimes came with an advantage. Since he had a big head, he also had a large brain. Having a large brain gave him the ability to have great sense of smell that helped him find food.
Teeth and Jaws
T h e i n f o r m a t i o n I g o t f r o m d i n o s a u r s f a c t s . o r g s a i d “ T y r a n n o s a u r u s r e x j a w s w e r e 4 f e e t (1.2m) long, over 60 thick conical, bonecrunching teeth that ranged in size from very small to over 9inch (23cm) long”.(dinosaurfacts.org) The T. rex could eat anything. Anywhere up to 500 pounds food which consisted of meat and bones. It teeth would go all around his mouth. Every tooth had a different purpose The T.rex also had an overbite. The bottom teeth fit inside the top teeth. Not all of the of their teeth served the same function, according to a study that was done recently. The T.rex front teeth gripped and pulled while the side teeth tore flesh from other animals. The back teeth was for big chunks of food that it grind down till it could force it into the throat. T. rex’s teeth could be very wide/big, but kind of dull. They were not like a sharp knife. With all that being said their teeth were strong. This was good so their teeth would not break due to a animal struggling trying to get away while he ate. (Zoomdinosaur.com)(dinosaurfacts.org)
Tyrannosaurus rex was a huge meat eating dinosaur which weighed almost 8 tons. The T.rex went after the big slow animals that he could catch and eat. Being a scavenger and hunter he ate carcasses, which is not a very consistent food source. He loved to eat marginocephalians and ornithopod.(dinosaurfacts.org) He also liked to feast on herbivorous dinosaurs, like triceratops. One of the most debated questions about the T.rex is if they hunted in packs or not. There are some information that maybe some of the T.rex relatives hunted in packs.
(Image Gallery: The life of T. Rex)
One of the most asked questions about the T.rex is why are their arms so little!
An expert on dinosaur Bob Strauss, states T. rex arms were tiny only in relative not absolute terms he explain what the word “tiny” means, T. rex was very huge in his adult size. His arms only looked small in size to the rest of its body, but they were still very much impressive in their own right. It is said that T. rex’s arms were over three feet long. A recent analysis showed that they may have been able to benchpress over 400 pounds each. In comparing to adult humans. T. rex’s arm muscles were over three times more powerful. People also misunderstood his range of arm motion and the flexibility of his fingers. Because his arms were limited they could only swing across an angle of 45 degrees, compared to a much wider range for smaller, more flexible theropods dinosaur, like the D einonychus. You may ask if he had tiny arms with little range how did he really use its arms ? some ideals were
A. B.
C.
Males used the (arms and hand) to grab onto females during mating.
If by some change it was knocked off its feet while fighting with a triceratops, or
if it slept lying down.
T rex used his arms to hold onto squirming prey, before he killed them with its powerful jaws
Remember these are only speculation to try to understand his arm usage. (Bob Strauss)
I was shocked to learn that birds came from dinosaurs . Many dinosaurs had feathers on them, but the dinosaur that closely resemble them are the raptors. It is believed that all tyrannosaurs had some sort of feathers on them during certain times of their life. They think all of them had feathers as a newborn baby. But as they grew to become an adult they most likely shedded most of their feathers and just had scales.
What killed TRex (Extinction)
It's hard to tell the lifespan of a dinosaur fossil remains, but most people think that the T.rex lived to be 30 years of age. They usually died of natural causes of just being old. Also they could have died from not finding food. One of the less likely cause of death would have been being a attacked by a theropod. Which in my opinion is kind of odd. I thought that would be a very big contributing factor. (Dinosaurs.About.com) (Enchantedlearning.com)
Megalodon Shark: The biggest sharks ever is the
“Carcharocles Megalodon in Greek is: Carcharocles “Famed for Jaggedness” and Megalodon; “Big Tooth”. “ quoted from Fossilguy..com (Fossilguy.com)
Carcharocles Megalodon is the biggest shark monster of all time! He is the largest animal from the sea in world history. He is bigger than any Great White shark or any ancient animal like the kronosaurus. This shark would have no problem eating any modern shark with ease. Megalodon first appeared about 20 million years age. The Megalodon teeth were so big people thought that the could be snakes or dragons.(flossilguy.com) They gave the tooth a nickname called the tongue stone. They were all mistaken though. It took all the way till the 1600s for someone to realize what they really were. Nicholas Steno was the person to figure out that the tongue stone was actually a tooth. After doing countless studies on the tooth scientist came up with new facts about the Megalodon habitat and size. They also figure out how the Megalodon became extinct just by studying the tooth.(Fossilguy.com)
Size of Megalodon Shark
No one can really know how big the monster they call the Megalodon shark could really get as a fully grown adult. Some people think that the shark could grow to be 59 feet long, but there are also people that say the shark could be 66 feet. No one is really sure though, these are just estimates. Typically the shark only got up to 33 feet as an adult.(fossilguy.com) With the shark being so large it is obvious that it also weighed a very large amount. Scientist have come to the conclusion that the Megalodon would have weighed somewhere around 65 tons. They could have weighed even more then that on special cases. People had said they grew to be 80 to 100 foot sorry not true. The shark average size was something like the Blue Whale, where is
something like lengths of about 94ft. Also we can learn how big the Megalodon was from its spine fossils not just the teeth fossil. There would be no fossil for the shark because the frame of the Megalodon would decay before the process could happen. Therefore the scientist get all their facts from just the teeth and the spine called centra. It would be so cool if someone could find one that was fully attached so we would just have to estimate. With what little information they have scientist have gather it is concluded that the shark had 46 frontrow teeth. Sharks have 6 rows of teeth so they think that the Megalodon had 276 teeth in all. Average size for one tooth for the shark was 5 inches. (Bob Strauss) (Fossilguy.com)
WarmWater Swimmer
Megalodon stayed in the warm oceans like the Miocene and Plocene. flossils of Carcharocles Megalodon can be discovered in many places around the world like japan, Europe, Australia ,Africa and the United States just to name a few except Antarctica. With all the information they have came up with, its have been concluded that the shark was in the intercontinental oceans. The shark would usually live in some sort of deep water and move to warm water when it was time to mate.(Dinosaur.About.com). They recently founded a boat load of fossils of the shark in South Carolina and Panama. They believe it was a Megalodon mating ground. Evidence show that the Megalodon act just like a white shark.(Flossilguy.com) The only difference between the sharks behaviors was the Megalodon was much scarier in features then the great white. (Dinosaur.About.com) (Flossilguy.com)
The Megalodon loved to eat
No animal in the ocean could stand up against the Megalodon. Every fish was fair game when this shark went on the hunt for food. The shark was even strong enough to feast on big turtles and even dolphins. This shark had the strongest jaws of any animal that ever walked the earth. (Dana Ehret) (Karen Carr)
The death of a legendary monster
Megalodon died out a very long time ago. Most scientists say the last Megalodon died almost 2 million years ago. Evidence show that the shark died out because the whale moved away because of temperature drop due to the ice age. Since the whales migrated away and the shark could not follow they slowly started to die out. Others think that they died out because their demand of food outweighed the supply of food they could get. It is believed that they made it to the ice age. Sad to say that it is no evidence that the the shark exist in today's time.
A scientist is now doing study of the Megalodon on the west coast of the United States. His name is Robert Boessenecker, and he is trying to see why the shark died out. (Robert Boessenecker) (Dana Ehret) (Fossilguy.com)
In conclusion, I hope that this information of the T.rex and the Megalodon has given a little more insight to a couple of the greatest animals of all time.