| “ | If you say "Tyrannosaurus rex", I think of gentleness. The superb motherhood and a struggle to raise one's chicks. | „ |
| ~ Dr. Bob Bakker, Extreme Survivors. |
| “ | You know, there's not a lawyer in this world that is too fat that T-rex couldn't swallow whole. | „ |
| ~ Dr. Peter L. Larson, Perfect Predators. |
Tyrannosaurus rex, often abbreviated as T. rex or T-rex, is an antagonistic species in a 2009 TV show documentary Clash of the Dinosaurs, serving as the protagonists of episodes one, two and four, as well as antagonists in the third. They also appear in a 2010 film documentary Last Day of the Dinosaurs.
They are based on a real life species of tyrannosaurid theropod that lived in the end of the Maastrichtian stage of the Cretaceous, functioning as the apex and the only large predator of the Laramidia (western part of North America) at the time, hunting dangerous megaherbivores like Triceratops or Ankylosaurus. Although enormous in their adulthood, they were very small and vulnerable after hatching and had to be protected by their parents. They went extinct once the Chicxulub Impactor struck the Earth and caused Cretaceous-Palogene mass extinction.
Appearance[]
Adult Tyrannosaurs are depicted with rose ebony skin with pronounced scales similar to osteoderms running across their backs, tails, necks and lower jaws, as well as bird-like scales on their feet. Their five-foot-long heads had a bony look with thin layer of skin covering holes in their skull, upper teeth were visible when their mouth was closed, tails were disproportionately thin, and they had small eyes with lion-like pupils. Their physical size was stated to be 5.5 meters (18.04 feet) tall, 12 meters (39.37 feet) long and seven tons. The females were 10-30% larger than males, a difference extreme for a dinosaur.
Hatched Tyrannosaurs have less exaggerated proportions, with smaller upright heads and less robust build. Their color scheme consists of light-grey skins with green spots and orange eyes, and they weigh about one and a half kilogram.
Behavior[]
Tyrannosaurus was very intelligent for a dinosaur, having a well-developed brain and taking care of its young, as well as devouring offspring of potential competitors. It could hunt alone or in duos, with the former having one parent guarding the nest while the other went off to feed. The dinosaur was well-adapted for both active hunting and detecting carcasses, and it was also a cannibal. Between the ages of fifteen and eighteen, the mortality for them increases five times, as adolescents challenge the adults over a mate, which often end in a death of the competitor. Males and females are also said to rarely interact with one another due to species' territoriality.
Abilities[]
- Enhanced Bite: Tyrannosaurus had a bone-crushing jaws driven by two sets of powerful muscles: the first runs from a the skull down to a bottom of the jaw, giving it its spear; the second make almost fifty percent of the muscles in the head and wrap around lower jaw tying it to the roof of the mouth. The whole head weighs nearly half a ton and generates three tons of force, two to four times the strength of a theropod of a comparable size and twice the strength of a great white shark. They are able to bend steel. This maximised a nutritional value extracted from its prey, which is further evidenced by the fossilized Tyrannosaurus turd, which contains fragments of herbivorous dinosaurs' bones. It was used by a female Tyrannosaurus to crush a horn of a Triceratops.
- Serrated Teeth: An adult Tyrannosaurus had up to sixty 36-centimeter-long serrated teeth and could leave a bite mark over a meter long, capable of penetrating and tearing flesh to shreds. Despite this, they were the bluntest (least sharp) among the tyrannosaur family, designed to crush through armored skin and thick muscle of big animals.
- Expandable Mouth: Like a python, Tyrannosaurus could dislocate its jaw, allowing the dinosaur to swallow objects larger than its own head.
- Venomous Saliva: There was a possibility that Tyrannosaurus had a sizeable amount of bacteria in its saliva due to small bits of rotting meat stuck between teeth, causing a life-threatening infection to anything it bit.
- Enhanced Vision: Tyrannosaurus had a cricket ball-sized eyeballs separated 40 cm from each other, allowing for a stereoscopic vision and detecting prey from up to six kilometers away.
- Enhanced Smelling: Tyrannosaurus had a large cavernous chambers lined with sheets of sensory tissue to distinguish odors, which are then transmitted to very big olfactory bulbs in the brain, the largest of any organism in the history of Earth. Its sense of smell was compared to that of a hundred bloodhounds and could theoretically allow it to identify every single person and creature in a crowded auditorium by their idiosyncratic odors within seconds. Due to this, whenever Tyrannosaurus would kill a dinosaur, it attracted others of its kind to feed.
- Enhanced Hearing: Tyrannosaurus had a 2.5 cm long cochlear, a hollow cone-shaped tube filled with liquid, distinguishing the sound through thousands of tiny hair-like cells and vibrating in response. This gave the predator ability to hear low-frequency sounds emitted by other dinosaurs and from very far away.
- Enhanced Strength: With its half-a-meter-thick muscular neck, Tyrannosaurus could lift a hippopotamus in its jaws.
- Enhanced Durability: Tyrannosaurus was able to walk after being hit with Ankylosaurus' tail club twice, only forcing it to back away from the fight. Even the shell of an egg was build like a motorcycle helmet, able to survive severe shock, and is additionally protected by the shock-absorbing gel-like albumin (egg white).
- Enhanced Speed: An adult Tyrannosaurus could cover up to five meters in a single stride and with a top speed of 25 kilometers per hour.
- Enhanced Endurance: Tyrannosaurus could survive being stabbed in the eye.
Weaknesses[]
- Hunger: Due to its large size and warm-blooded metabolism, an adult Tyrannosaurus had to consume over a million calories or about 700 kilograms every week. This significantly reduced its capacity to guard its offspring for an extended period of time, meaning that if one parent died, the other would have to leave the nest at predators' mercy. Naturally, laying eggs requires storing calcium in medullary bone and takes a lot from the female, thus once it is done, she has to hunt and eat as quickly as possible. Moreover, females have a finite amount of eggs in their body compared to males, which produce hundreds of sperm cells every day.
- Reduced Agility: Tyrannosaurus required two seconds to make a 45-degree turn.
- Small Arms: Tyrannosaurus' arms were infamously small and incapable of gripping prey or reaching its mouth.
- Childhood: As a chick, Tyrannosaurus would often fall victim to other Tyrannosaurs, large herbivores and especially pterosaurs like Quetzalcoatlus.
Trivia[]
- There is no direct evidence of Tyrannosaurus guarding its nests like crocodiles. In reality, they most likely filled different niches depending on the age like some monitor lizards, considering Hell Creek Formation fossils of several Tyrannosaurus-like predators that may have been its juvenile stages.