The Tyrannosaurs Rex male.....

We all know Tyrannosaurus Rex- the largest land carnivore to ever walk the earth- a six tonne walking behemoth, who terrorized the earth some 65 million years ago. We all imagine this creature to be an enormous, merciless predator who uses his fearsome jaws and bone-crushing teeth to deliver a fatal bite on his prey. But new evidence has emerged and this makes the tyrannosaur an even more formidable prospect and provides a fascinating insight into what happened to this humungous beast.

The first line of evidence comes from the evolution of birds from theropod dinosaurs (or dinosaurs so bad, they will bust your backside and then eat you). We know that birds share a variety of characteristics with many theropods and indeed scientists now conclude that birds split from the group that contained these meat eaters. Their eggs were virtually indistinguishable from a bird's egg and they had similar foot structure. So thus, using "sound" logic, we can conclude that T. rex was indeed closely linked to birds.

We also thought that T.rex's arms were pretty useless. This was the theory prevalent in the scientific community until new evidence about the neurology of these dinosaurs came to light. Using accurate scanning techniques and creating a cast of the brain of the dinosaur and skeletal structure, paleo-neurologists have come to the conclusion that there was a huge bundle of neurons running from the arms to the tail of the dinosaur. This made the T.Rex's arms very sensitive to touch and would have made him ticklish to say the least. These connections show that the arms acted as some sort of "trigger" to the tail of the dinosaur, like a toggle switch. These were found only on the male T.rex and lent more credence to sexual dimorphism present in these dinosaurs.

Respected paleobiomechanist, Ricky Ho, from Amblin Entertainment, who provided his expertise to the depiction and movement of the dinosaurs in the movie Jurassic Park et al (he attributes the incorrect velociraptor depictions to being stoned on "high quality weed") has recently published a paper on the movement of a T.rex's tail and to his astonishment, he was able to calculate that T.rex could create tremendous forces with his tail (once again found only in the male dinosaurs) and his calculations suggest that this would have lifted the dinosaur off the ground. His explanation was that the male T.rex was a henpecked dinosaur, whose murderous and larger wife, the female T.rex hounded him to get more hardrosaur or sauropod on the table. To escape the nagging, the male would use the toggle in his arms and then fly away. Calculations and careful juxtapositioning with the program "Photoshop" state that the male T.rex was able to fly at an altitude of seventy feet allowing him to talk to his best buddy Breviparopus, before sinking his teeth into him and bringing him back to his nest. This also explains why Breviparopus skeletons are rare to find.

Here is the picture published in the paper:




In case you haven't noticed, this was a bit of fun