T-Rex, the most famous beast among the dinosaurs that once ruled our planet, is a common fixture when the pre-historic times need visual representation. Thanks to the movies, we imagine T Rex as towering, all-chomping, murderous monster. But just how big this dino really was? At the species' prime there were more than 2 billion T Rex roaming on the planet. And we have only 84 skeletons. Among them is Scotty, the biggest T Rex we have ever found. And he weighed about 8800 kgs.
But now scientists think that the biggest T Rex may have been about 70 per cent bigger than Scotty. The behemoth weighed 15000 Kg.
Experts from the Canadian Museum of Nature and Queen Mary University of London made the study.
"...unless population sampling is both intensive and spatiotemporally exhaustive, it can be difficult to establish the upper limits of body size even for extant species...," wrote the team in their study.
"Some isolated bones and pieces certainly hint at still larger individuals than for which we currently have skeletons," says David Hone, paleobiologist from Queen Mary University of London.
During the study, the researchers created 140 million virtual T Rexes using computer model. They introduced a large number of variables like population size, lifespan, growth rate and more.
"It's important to stress that this isn't really about T. rex, which is the basis of our study, but this issue would apply to all dinosaurs, and lots of other fossil species," says Hone.
"Arguing about 'which is the biggest?' based on a handful of skeletons really isn't very meaningful."
