If you are on any of these Par Jurassick movies, you would know that the carnivore, the T-Rex is the scariest dinosaur among the others.
But are the T-Rexes the most dangerous dinosaurs out there? The giant meat-eating dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus rex – sometimes weighing 9 tons of weight as adults – ruled the landscape of the Cretaceous period.
But even as juveniles, scientists said Thursday, these terrifying species – collectively known as megatheropods – have radically reshaped the composition of dinosaur communities around the world, knocking out meat-competitors. eat midsized.
Researchers studied dinosaur communities – the species of meat eaters and plant eaters living in the same place at the same time – in 43 locations worldwide during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, which spanning the last 136 million years of the dinosaur ‘s age.
Carnivorous dinosaurs came from a group called theropods. The largest were megatheropods, bipedal beetles with large skulls, strong jaws and menacing teeth.
Paleo-ecologists from the University of New Mexico and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln have demonstrated that the children of giant carnivorous dinosaurs, such as Tyrannosaurus rex, could fundamentally reshape their communities by introducing competitive species less.
The study, published this week in the journal Science, the first to study dinosaur diversity at the community level while treating juveniles as their own ecological entity.
“Dinosaur communities were like shopping malls on Saturday afternoons – full of teenagers,” explained Kat Schroeder, a graduate student in the UNM Department of Biology who led the study. “They were a big part of the people in gender and would have had a huge impact on the facilities available in communities.”
Cretaceous dinosaur communities that included a megatheropod – defined as a predator weighing at least a ton – were also gathered by small predators – under about 220 pounds (100 kg) – but usually not moderate meat eaters between these two weight ranges.
This “gap” appears to have been caused by the presence of young megatheropods that evolved from small dog-sized infants to teenage infants before they reached adult dimensions.
These juveniles filled an ecological niche – using a specific set of physical features to target predatory prey – that could be used by another species.
“Just as parents drop their teens off at the center to get their hair out, Mesozoic communities may be age-separated, with adult megatheropods hunting and eating. in their own way, while young people of the same sex were doing something completely different, ”Kat Schroeder added Reuters.
Because they were born from eggs, dinosaurs may have been born as a small T. rex – about the size of a domestic cat. This meant that as they grew to the size of a city bus, these “megatheropods”, weighing between one and eight tonnes, would have changed their hunting patterns and prey products. There has long been a suspicion by paleontologists that giant carnivorous dinosaurs would change behavior as they grew. But it was not yet known how this might affect the world around them.
Juveniles of Cretaceous North American megatheropods such as Tyrannosaurus and Albertosaurus were relatively light and energetic, Schroeder noted, making them well-suited for hunting a variety of prey, compared to larger and larger adults with crushed jaws. bone and legs slightly to some extent shorter.
These dinosaurs lived to the age of 40, with spurts growing up as teenagers.
Adding to their behavior, a study in early January found original remains from the group of wild meat-eating dinosaurs that include T. rex – fossil jaw and claw bones that show these babies were of recorded size looks very similar to adults and that they were born. ready ”for hunting.
The hook has unique tyrannosaur features, including a deep inner groove and a prominent chin. Tyrannosaurs “seemed to be born ready to hunt, with some of the key changes already giving tyrannosaurs powerful bites. So it looks like they were able to hunt quickly after they were born. ”