If this doesn't give Hollywood license to achieve even greater success next year, Jurassic Park movie, then I don't know.
A new study, conceived by an Ottawa scientist and a British colleague as a COVID-19 lockdown project, suggests dinosaurs may have been even larger than previously thought.
Jordan Mallon, a paleobiologist at the Canadian Museum of Nature, and David Hone of Queen Mary University of London recently published their findings in a scientific journal Ecology and evolutionThe pair focused on tyrannosaurs, although the results should have made one think about all dinosaurs.
They concluded that the largest member of the tyrannosaur family may have weighed about 15 tons, or more than 33,000 pounds—70 percent heavier than previous estimates and comparable to full school bus or two average male African elephants.
It could also be 25 percent longer – 15 meters.
Mallon and Hone looked at known Tyrannosaurus rex fossils and then used the dimensions of modern alligators (given their large size and close relationship with dinosaurs) using computer modeling to extrapolate how big the largest Tyrannosaurus rex might have been.
Their methodology was dictated by the relative rarity of available Tyrannosaurus fossils compared to other dinosaur species; on its own, this small sample is unlikely to represent the largest Tyrannosaurus ever to roam the Earth.
But based on past discoveries of giants in some modern animal species, “there must have been larger dinosaurs that have not yet been found,” the study says. Hence the alligator comparison.
“Plus, it's just funny to think about a 15-ton T. rex,” Mallon said.
“It's such a big animal, first of all… Tyrannosaurus rex should teach us something about the limits of what it takes to be that kind of animal,” he said.
“Do they collapse under their own weight? Can such a large animal find enough food in this area to feed itself?”
Useful new tool
Thomas Carr, director of the Institute of Paleontology at Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin, says Mallon and Hone's hypothesis provides a useful upper limit for comparing future fossil discoveries.
“What we think is the maximum size of any dinosaur species is almost certainly wrong simply because the fossil record is incomplete,” Carr said.
He added that the growing number of fossils collected by private collectors are “really useless.”
“Who knows? Perhaps among these private fossils lies a test of Jordan and David's hypothesis.”