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After 25 years of collecting fossils at a Pennsylvania site, scientists at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University now have a much better picture of an ancient, extinct 12-foot fish and the world in which it lived.

Although Hyneria lindae was initially described in 1968, it was done without a lot of fossil material to go on. But since the mid-1990s, dedicated volunteers, students, and paleontologists digging at the Red Hill site in northern Pennsylvania's Clinton County have turned up more -- and better quality -- fossils of the fish's skeleton that have led to new insights.

Academy researchers Ted Daeschler, PhD, and Jason Downs, PhD, who specialize in the Devonian time period (a time before dinosaurs and even land animals) when Hyneria lived, have been able to reconstruct that the predator had a blunt, wide snout, reached 10-12 feet in length, had small eyes and featured a sensory system that allowed it to hunt prey by feeling pressure waves around it.

"Dr. Keith Thomson, the man who first described Hyneria in 1968, did not have enough fossil material to reconstruct the anatomy that we have now been able to document with more extensive collections," explained Daeschler, curator of Vertebrate Zoology at the Academy, as well as a professor in Drexel's College of Arts and Sciences.

Originally, pieces of the fish were collected in the 1950s. Thomson described and officially named Hyneria lindae in 1968, but he had just a few pieces of a crushed skull and some scales to work with.

The new discoveries that Daeschler and Downs (who is an assistant professor at Delaware Valley University) wrote about in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology were made possible by years of collecting that turned up, "well-preserved, well-prepared three-dimensional material of almost all of the [bony] parts of the skeleton," according to Downs.

No single complete skeleton exists of this giant, but enough is there to show that Hyneria would have truly been a monster to the other animals in the subtropical streams of the Devonian Period, roughly 365 million years ago. An apex predator, Hyneria's mouth was bristling with two-inch fangs. For reference, that's bigger than most modern Great White Shark's teeth.

Due to its sheer size, weaponry, and sensory abilities, Hyneriamay have preyed upon anything from ancient placoderms (armored fish), to acanthodians (related to sharks) and sarcopterygians (lobe-finned fish, the group Hyneria belongs to) -- including early tetrapods (limbed vertebrates) that are also found at the site.

Since the streams Hyneria lived in were likely murky and not conducive to hunting by eyesight, sensory canals allowed it to detect fish swimming near it and attack them.

"We discovered that the skull roof elements have openings on their surfaces that connect up, forming a network of tubes that would function like the sensory line system in some modern aquatic vertebrates," Daeschler said. "Similarly, we found a network of connected pores on the parts of the scales that would be exposed on the body of Hyneria."

All of the new information gleaned about Hyneria is doubly valuable because it provides more information about the ecosystem -- and time period -- it lived in. The Devonian was a pivotal time in vertebrate evolution, especially since some of Hyneria's fellow lobe-finned fish developed specialized fins that would take them onto land and eventually give rise to all limbed verterbates including reptiles, amphibians and mammals.

"Hyneria lived in a time and place that is of incredible interest to those of us studying the vertebrate fin-to-limb transition," Downs commented. "Each study like this one contributes more to our understanding of these ecosystems and what may have played a part in the successful transition to land."

Story Source:

Materials provided by Drexel University. Original written by Frank Otto. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference:

1. Edward B. Daeschler, Jason P. Downs. New description and diagnosis of Hyneria lindae (Sarcopterygii, Tristichopteridae) from the Upper Devonian Catskill Formation in Pennsylvania, U.S.A.. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 2018; e1448834 DOI: 10.1080/02724634.2018.1448834

Source: www.sciencedaily.com

During the last ice age, a small horse about the size of a Shetland pony somehow trampled into a big lake. It's unclear how the animal died, but its body fell to the bottom of the lake, where it lay buried for about 16,000 years — that is, until this past fall, when landscapers in Utah unexpectedly unearthed the horse's remains in their backyard.

The discovery is a rare one. Horses lived in North America from about 50 million to 11,000 years ago, when they went extinct on the continent before being reintroduced by the Europeans thousands of years later, but it's uncommon to find horse remains in Utah, a state that was partly covered by the prehistoric Lake Bonneville. (This ancient lake has since dwindled, forming several smaller lakes, including the Great Salt Lake.)

It's impossible to know how the horse died, but Rick Hunter, a paleontologist at the Museum of Ancient Life, in Lehi, Utah, who is studying the horse's remains, has several ideas. Perhaps the horse made its way into the lake and then drowned while trying to escape from an ice age predator, such as a short-faced bear or saber-toothed cat, he said. Or maybe the horse died in a stream whose waters emptied into the lake.

"We really don't know for sure," Hunter told Live Science.

Even so, it's a prize specimen, he said. Based on the sediment layer where the horse was found, it is likely between 14,000 to 16,000 years old, Hunter said. It's unclear whether the horse was male or female, but it was likely a bit older, given that it had arthritis in its back vertebrae and a bone growth on its right hind leg that looks cancerous, Hunter said.

A quick examination showed that the horse was short and stocky. Its "femur appears to be as bulky as a modern-day horse, but shorter," Hunter said.

He noted that the horse's remains aren't fossilized into mineral like some dinosaur bones are. "This animal isn't old enough yet for that to have happened," Hunter said. Rather, the horse's bones stayed moist in the wet ground for thousands of years. When damp, ancient bones are exposed to the dry air, they can dry too quickly and crack.

To save the bones, researchers can bury them in containers with wet sand and let the water evaporate slowly over several months, Hunter said.

"I've seen mammoth bones in the past that have come out of the ground," Hunter said. "Without doing that [wet sand] procedure, they actually just develop really big splits longitudinally down the bone."

Once the horse's bones are properly preserved, the researchers plan to do more accurate dating on them and determine the species. The Hills still own the horse, because it was found on their land. But the museum is in discussions with them about possibly donating it so that it can go on public display, Hunter said.

Original article on Live Science.

Good news for people who hate hybrid dinosaurs: Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom will apparently be the last entry in the franchise to feature hybrid dinos. Director Colin Trevorrow says Jurassic World 3 will be hybrid dinosaur free.

Are you sick of all the super-charged hybrid dinosaurs in the Jurassic World franchise? Jurassic World had the Indominus rex, and the upcoming Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom has the Indoraptor. What happened to the good old days of realdinosaurs, like the T-Rex? Well, if you’re craving more old school dino action for future Jurassic World films, you’re in luck. Colin Trevorrow, who helmed Jurassic World and will return to direct Jurassic World 3, has confirmed that the third entry in the Jurassic World franchise will be free of hybrid dinosaurs.

Speaking with Total Film (via Bloody Disgusting), Trevorrow said of Jurassic World 3:

“I’m looking forward to, in the third film, getting a little back into the Paleontological, wild animal, true dinosaur nature of all of it.”

Trevorrow goes on to say that the Indoraptor will be the last hybrid dinosaur in the Jurassic World trilogy. Here’s where I put on some big-ass nerd glasses and interject that technically, all of the dinosaurs in the Jurassic franchise have been hybrids. As our old friend Mr. DNA taught us in the first Jurassic Park, the Jurassic geneticits needed to fill the missing DNA codes on the dinosaurs with other animals, so they used frog DNA. So technically speaking, all the dinosaurs are actually frog-dinosaur hybrids.

That said, what Trevorrow is saying here is that Jurassic World 3 is going to rely less on made-up dinosaurs and more on the type of real-world dinos everyone has come to love. This seems to tie into a back-to-basics approach Trevorrow and co-writer Emily Carmichael seem to be taking to the film. In a previous interview, Trevorrow said Jurassic World 3would be a “science thriller” akin to the first Jurassic Park:

“If I could contextualize each film, I would say Jurassic World was an action adventure, Fallen Kingdom is kind of a horror suspense film, and Jurassic World 3 will be a science thriller in the same way that Jurassic Park was.”

Beyond that, we know that Jurassic World 3 will close-out a trilogy that Trevorrow pitched before he made Jurassic World. As the filmmaker himself said:

“I knew where I wanted it to go. I remember telling Steven [Spielberg] even while we were making the first movie, ‘This is the beginning. Here is the middle. And here’s the end of the end. This is where we want to go.’ I feel like that kind of design is crucial to a franchise like this if you really want to bring people along with you and make sure they stay interested. It needs to be thought through on that level. It can’t be arbitrary, especially if we want to turn this into a character-based franchise with people who you lean in to follow what they’re going to do.”

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom opens on June 22, 2018. Jurassic World 3 will hit theaters on June 11, 2021.

Source: www.slashfilm.com

Steve Brusatte loves dinosaurs. He’s worried that you may not love them nearly enough.

“I think dinosaurs are unfortunately seen as a childhood obsession, as movie monsters,” says Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh. “But they are one of the most fascinating topics in science—some of the greatest creatures evolution has ever produced.”

His new book, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, offers a convincing case as to why grownups should have more respect for the bird-like giants who stomped about prehistoric Earth. “I was taught that dinosaurs were big, scaly, stupid brutes so ill-equipped for their environment that they just lumbered around, biding their time, waiting to go extinct,” he writes. “Evolutionary failures. Dead ends in the history of life.”

It’s true that dinosaurs went extinct some 66 million years ago, doomed by a stray comet or asteroid—scientists aren’t sure which. But before that, dinosaurs reigned supreme for 150 million years, thanks in large part to their cleverness and adaptability. Homo sapiens, by contrast, have only been around for an estimated 300,000 years. Compared to dinosaurs, we kind of suck. (My editor objects to this characterization: Unfair! Maybe we will also live for 150 million years! We don’t know yet! But look how terrible everything is all the time. I think we know.)

“Dinosaurs were great successes,” Brusatte tells Quartz. “To rule the world takes some real talent and ingenuity. They weren’t slow-moving; they were fast. They weren’t dim-witted; we can tell from CAT scans that they had big brains and keen senses.” And yet we continue to insult dinosaurs’ intelligence by using their name to describe out-of-touch oafs like disgraced Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein.

“The word ‘dinosaur’ should be a token of success,” Brusatte says. “Don’t belittle the dinosaurs—they weren’t like this.” Here are just a few reasons to give a damn about dinos today:

Dinosaurs remind us of our human fragility

Think of dinosaurs as the popular high-school quarterbacks of prehistoric Earth. For many millions of years, they were the undisputed kings of the planet. The long-necked sauropods were so tall they could munch on tree tops. The allosauruses had teeth so sharp they could slice those sauropods apart and eat them for lunch. Everyone was having a great time. Then, out of nowhere, a space rock the size of Mount Everest collided with the Earth, triggering earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, wildfires, and oven-like temperatures, all while clouding the atmosphere with debris so thick that it blocked out the sun.

You know what dinosaurs did about that? They died. We’d do the same thing, too.

“They give us a new perspective on place in our world and how tenuous it can really be,” Brusatte says. “Even if you’re at the pinnacle of nature, there’s no guarantee you’re going to be there forever. The title of the book, The Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs, is an homage to the Roman Empire, because I see dinosaurs as an empire. They had to rise up, and they did. They became stupendously dominant. Then they fell. That’s true so many times in human history—some kingdom is all-powerful, and then it falls.”

Humans only exist today because dinosaurs died out

The very first mammals evolved during the Triassic period, around 230 million years ago, Brusatte explains. “These mammals remained small, humble, living in the shadows throughout the age of the dinosaurs. They were swimmers, burrowers, tree climbers, gliders. And they always stayed small.” The ones that survived the fallout from the space rock were not much bigger than rats.

It was only once the dinosaurs were wiped out that mammals got a chance to to take their evolutionary shot. “Almost immediately after their extinction, you get cow-sized mammals and big, burrowing, badger-like mammals,” Brusatte explains. “Dinosaurs were so good in their ecological niche at a large size. They were like the incumbents—a politician who’s been in office 30, 40 years. The moment the T. Rex disappeared, mammals started to evolve like crazy.”

Within, at most, 1 million years of the great dinosaur die-off, tree-swinging monkeys were on the scene. In other words, Brusatte says, “it was the collapse of the dinosaurs that directly led to primates, and later to humans.”

Dinosaurs offer a lesson in the importance of biodiversity

When adults think about dinosaurs, we tend to go straight to the marquee names—the T. rex and Stegosaurus, the Velociraptor and Brontosaurus. But scientists know of at least 700 or 800 species of dinosaurs, and believe that there are many more.

“Dinosaurs and other fossils tell us that diversity is a key to success,” Brusatte says. Because dinosaurs were diverse, they were better able to adapt to environmental changes. When sauropods went on the wane after the late Jurassic period, for example, carnivores lost a common food source—which could have thrown the whole food chain out of whack. Instead, his book explains, some meat-eating dinosaurs “started to experiment with weird diets, trading in meat for nuts, seeds, bugs, and shellfish…. A weird clan of large theropods called spinosaurids evolved sails on their backs and long snouts full of cone-shaped teeth, and moved into water, where they started behaving like crocodiles and eating fish.”

The adaptive ability of dinosaurs has new relevance in the present day, Brusatte says, as climate change leads to what scientists are calling the Sixth Extinction. “A lot of species are going extinct at more rapid rate than in any time in human history,” Brusatte notes.

“They were creatures at the pinnacle of nature, before humans, who had to deal with real changes in climate—volcanoes, asteroids, rising temperatures, rising sea levels,” Brusatte says. “That makes them important. We need to know, what happens when sea levels change and temperatures go way up? Dinosaurs and ancient animals hold the clues.”

Source: https://qz.com

Utah State Parks is asking for help to stop vandalism of dinosaur tracks at Red Fleet State Parks.

Some visitors have been "ripping up sandstone slabs containing 200-million-year-old dinosaur tracks and throwing them into the water," Utah State Parks stated in a blog.

"While this problem is quite alarming, often times the people who are doing this have no idea they could be destroying millions of years of history," said Josh Hansen, a park manager.

"Some of the tracks are very distinct to the layperson," Hansen said, "but just as many are not. That is why it is important to not disturb any rocks at the dinosaur trackway."

People come from across the country and world to visit Red Fleet.

By treating the track site with such carelessness, people take away from the experiences of thousands of others — and it is a crime.

"It is illegal to displace rocks that contain the tracks," Hansen said. "Disturbing them like this is an act of vandalism."

Vandalism has become more frequent in the last six months. The park estimates at least 10 dinosaur tracks have been vandalized in that time.

There are already signs to show visitors where the dinosaur tracks are, but in light of the recent vandalism wave, park staff have begun to install additional signs.

"Utah State Parks believes education can play a big part in stopping this kind of behavior," Utah State Parks said. "To help combat it, we are asking everyone to spread the word. Please do not throw any rocks in the dinosaur track area at Red Fleet State Park. Help us keep the area preserved and beautiful for visitors both tomorrow and for generations to come."

Source: http://kutv.com

A fire broke out at Dinosaur Planet on Friday afternoon as workers were tearing down the amusement park, which closed its doors to the public last month, on Sukhumvit Road in Bangkok. 

Traffic Police reported on the @fm91trafficpro Twitter account that the fire began around 3pm and pictures on several Twitter accounts showed black smoke billowing into the sky. 

Firefighters put out the fire about 20 minutes later, it added.

Police at Thong Lor station are investigating the cause of the blaze. No injuries have been reported. 

It was the second fire at the park, located between Soi Sukhumvit 22 and 24. The first was in April 2016. 

Dinosaur Planet closed on April 20 this year after two years in operation.

Source: www.bangkokpost.com

An 11-year-old girl from Tennessee stumbled upon a rare fossil that was 475 million years old. 

Ryleigh Taylor was fishing with her parents Monday when she decided to take a break and go for a walk.

“My friend took over the rod because I got tired, and I started to walk over all the rocks,” Ryleigh, 11, said. “Then on my way back I was looking down so I wouldn’t fall, and I thought it was a bug at first, so I went over to see what it was.”

Ryleigh called out to her parents three or four times to come look at her discovery: a fossil.

Ryleigh’s mom was skeptical.

“She knew it was a fossil, but she was trying to get us to come over and look at it, and I wouldn’t because I just knew it wasn’t…I just thought it was something on the rock,” Ryleigh’s mother Tammy Taylor said.

So, Ryleigh brought the fossil over to prove what it was.

“Oh my gosh, that is a fossil,” Tammy Taylor said she realized.

Tammy home-schools Ryleigh and thought following up with a scientist would be a good school project. Ryleigh was excited about that.

“We bring [the fossil] home and she keeps on to us about calling somebody and finding out what kind it is,” Tammy said. “Even the next morning, she woke up begging us to call. So finally, I got on the phone.”

It turns out Ryleigh’s fossil is a 475-million-year-old trilobite.

“She laughed and was jumping,” Tammy Taylor said of Ryleigh’s response when they found out how old the fossil was. “That’s hard to take in… 475 million years, that’s a long time.”

A trilobite is an arthropod, a group that includes insects and spiders. It would most closely relate to the modern horseshoe crab, said Colin Sumrall, assistant professor of paleobiology at the University of Tennessee.

Sumrall said he gets requests to look at “fossils” at least once a week. Ninety-five percent of them are not, in fact, fossils.

Ryleigh’s was. And her find is old.

“That’s about as old as you can get,” Sumrall said. “The oldest fossils are maybe a little older than that.”

A “little older,” meaning 540 million years old.

It’s even rarer to find an intact trilobite, as their fossils break into pieces, Sumrall said. Ryleigh’s fossil appears to be of an exoskeleton, which trilobites would shed as they grew.

Ryleigh said she will most likely continue to hunt for fossils. She just likes being outside and exploring.

“She wants kids to realize that they need to put their games down and their cell phones down and get outside and explore more,” Tammy Taylor said.

Source: www.knoxnews.com

The world's oldest fossil plant, a six-cm-long stem that is 432 million years old, was a part of the collections in the Prague-seated National Museum's (NM) depositories for 150 years before being uncovered by contemporary experts, the NM told CTK on Thursday.

The preserved fossil proves that the terrestrial flora in the relevant period could produce oxygen and must have had a green colour, say the experts from the NM, Charles University's Faculty of Sciences and the Czech Academy of Sciences, who assisted in the discovery and have written about it in the Nature Plants journal.

The fossil stem was found by famous French paleontologist Joachim Barrande (1799-1883) in the rock massive near the Lodenice village, southwest of Prague. Barrande's collection was later acquired by the Patriotic Museum, which was the NM's predecessor in the early 19th century.

No one paid any special attention to the fossil plant at the time. It was labelled an unknown fossil species and put in a depository.

Experts uncovered it only in 2011 when paleontologists were moving the NM's collections to other depositories outside Prague before the reconstruction of the museum historical building, which dates back to the late 19th century.

The NM says the fossil is interesting not only for its age but also its size. The so far known oldest plant remnant in Ireland is only a few millimetres long, and other plant fossils found in Britain and Brazil did not cross 2.5 centimetres either.

"It was supposed that so small a plant could not have contained supportive, conductive or even photosynthetic tissues. Paleontologist Kevin Boyce even supposed that those first plants could not be green. The Czech find, some six centimetres long, refutes this theory. The size of the stem of the described specimen clearly proves that this cooksonia plant's body volume was sufficient for it to secure the basic functions of a vascular plant, including photosynthesis, the distribution of water and nutrients, and to be capable of independent life," said the NM, which is to put the fossil on display in its reconstructed building to be opened this autumn.

Source: www.praguemonitor.com

On the Philippines’ northern island of Luzon, researchers have made an exciting find: stone tools and bones from a butchered rhinoceros that date to 709,000 years ago, hundreds of thousands of years before modern humans evolved.

As Belinda Smith at the Australia Broadcasting Company reports, the find raises questions about what species of human made it to Luzon that long ago and how they traversed the ocean. But it also contributes to an increasingly complex picture of human migration. “The original story for human evolution was very basic, that maybe there was one single migration into places like South-East Asia,” says Gilbert Price, paleontologist at the University of Queensland who was not involved in the study, Smith reports. “But it’s becoming so much more complicated now.”

The remains aren’t the first evidence of ancient human activity found on the island, but they are the oldest researchers could accurately date. In the 1950s, a team of U.S. researchers discovered butchered animal bones and stone tools in the Kalinga region of Luzon. But with limited dating methods, they could only guesstimate the age, suggesting a range of 780,000 to 120,000 years old. Until this most recent find, Smith reports, the only strong evidence of hominin occupation came from a foot bone found in nearby Callao Cave on Luzon, which was dated to 67,000 years ago.

In 2013, paleontologists decided to return to Cagayan Valley, near where the previous artifacts were found. “For the first couple of weeks, we didn’t see much,” Gert van den Bergh, a paleontologist at the University of Wollongong in Australia tells Smith. “But we kept going, and not long after, bingo! Nearly a whole rhinoceros skeleton.”

That wasn’t all. They also found 57 stone tools including 49 sharp-edged flakes and six cores, or the stones the flakes were chipped from, and two possible hammer stones, according to a press release. The rhino skeleton had cut marks on 13 of its bones and both of its humerus bones were cracked open, giving feasting hunters access to its marrow. There were other animal remains as well, including deer, a turtle, a monitor lizard and a stegodon, an elephant relative with a weird sideways trunk. The researchers detail the find in a new paper published in the journal Nature.

To come up with a date, the researchers analyzed both the clay layer where they found the items and the enamel of a rhino tooth. The tests suggest the remains are between 777,000 and 631,000 years old. That’s 300,000 years before researchers think modern humans, Homo sapiens, even evolved.

So if modern humans didn’t cut up the rhinoceros, who did? Van den Bergh tells Smith it was likely Homo erectus, the first hominin believed to have ventured out of Africa.

As Jen Viegas at Seeker reports, the species was common in Asia by that time and had four potential routes into the Philippines. But recent studies also suggest Homo floresiensis—also known as “hobbits”—could have beat Homo erectus to the area. They were found on the nearby island of Flores in Indonesia ten years ago. It’s also possible the rhino was butchered by some as-yet-undiscovered Homo species.

As van den Bergh tells Smith, the species responsible for the butchery remains speculative since the researchers found no hominin fossil evidence, and many species created the type of tools found in the region.

There’s also the question of how the ancient humans got to the island nation in the first place. As Thomas Ingicco, lead author of the study, tells Viegas, it’s most likely that they arrived accidentally, riding on natural floating rafts of mangroves tangles that could have broken from mainland Asia during typhoons or tsunamis. Much less likely, but still possible, is the idea that they came to the islands using a primitive boat.

The latest find also raises the possibility that even older evidence of ancient human activity exists on the island. And researchers are on the case. As van den Bergh says in the press release: “Now we can go looking in older strata and see if we can find more artifacts, or even better, fossil evidence.”

Source: www.smithsonianmag.com

Tyrannosaurus rex was smarter than we thought.

The Tyrannosaurus rex is, without a doubt, the greatest predator to have walked this Earth. As an adult it was an efficient killing machine, with eyes as big as grapefruits and teeth the size of railway spikes that could crush clean through the bones of its prey.

The T. rex has an enormous reputation, but it’s never been known for its intelligence. The standard line for most of paleontological history has been that dinosaurs were unevolved, and frankly, rather dumb.

But in the book The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World, University of Edinburgh paleontologist Steve Brusatte suggests that T. rex was much more than a giant brute—it was social, and likely very smart, as smart as humans’ closest genetic cousins, chimpanzees.

“It does sound like a pretty bold statement, because chimps are quite intelligent, and we’re used to thinking about dinosaurs as being stupid,” he told The Daily Beast. “That’s the way I was taught about them in school—that they were these walnut-brained losers of prehistory.”

Paleontologists have built digital models of T. rex brains, using CT scans of the insides of their skulls, and have found them to be surprisingly voluminous. We have more clues about T. rexes than close to any other dinosaur, with the fossilized remains of more than 50 T. rexes dug up to date in North America. (Its close cousins have been found in others parts of the world.)

“We actually know more about T. rex than we do about a lot of modern, living animals,” Brusatte said. “We know how old it was when it would normally die, how fast it grew, how it hunted, what it hunted, how it reproduced, how it breathed, what its brain was like, what its senses were like. We know these things because the fossils in that case are so good, and they’ve been studied in so much detail.”

Brusatte asserts in his book that this plethora of fossilized information gives us valuable insight into the neuroscience of the T. rex. By calculating the ratio of brain size to body size as a measure of intelligence (modern day animal scientists use this ratio as an approximation), we can infer that the T. rex about matches a chimp on smarts, and was quite a bit keener than a pet cat or dog.

“We need to start thinking of dinosaurs as not just brutes and not just monsters, and not just things with sharp teeth and sharp claws, but as really active, intelligent, energetic animals that oftentimes had keen senses,” said Brusatte. “An animal like T. rex was a predator that used brain and brawn: its big brain, its great sense of smell and its really keen sense of hearing were probably as important to it, if not more so, than its sharp claws and its sharp teeth and its big jaw muscles.”

Although T. rexes were famously good hunters, their brains would have been useful for many other tasks as well. There’s evidence that at least some species in the tyrannosaur group were social animals. Some guarded their nests of eggs and may have helped raise their young. They had relationships with each other as may have had rich interior lives as well.

For a T. rex, being smart was certainly a matter of survival. Sure, it might not be so challenging to get by as a 40-foot-long animal weighing eight tons, but it’s easy to forget that each adult T. rex began its life as a pigeon-sized infant. Growing up in a dinosaur-eat-dinosaur world isn’t easy, particularly if that means putting on five pounds a day every day for a decade just to get through the awkward teenage years.

“It would have been hard to be the king,” said Brusatte. “A lot of the things they were eating, like triceratops, for instance—they would have fought back. Triceratops had these big, nasty horns, three of them, on its head. And it would have used them to fight back at a T. rex. We know that there were battles between those two dinosaurs. Bite marks from T. rex teeth on Triceratops bones attest to that.”

Ultimately, there’s a limit to how well we can know the Tyrannosaurus rex. When a giant space rock collided with Earth 66 million years ago, the greatest land predator’s days were numbered. Humans arrived on the scene just recently, and a lot of the evidence has gone missing.

There’s certainly more to be discovered. That could involve novel investigations of existing fossils, or altogether new discoveries. One day we may find a skin impression that will show, finally, what a T. rex’s feathers looked like. (Evidence from its closest kin suggest T. rex was a feathered beast.) We may even find out what color they were.

“We really don’t know what we’re going to find, and that makes it really interesting,” said Brusatte. “We are in a phase now where we are not running out of dinosaurs. This shows no sign of stopping. I think that’s a great thing for younger people to know—people that are interested in careers in paleontology. There’s still a lot to be found out there.”

Source: www.thedailybeast.com