Re: True Color Dinosaur Revealed (Nat Geo)
Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2010 5:22 pm
Juan_Bottom wrote:muy_thaiguy wrote:Actually, on the T-rex thing, a recent program I watched talked about how the T-rex would have actually been fairly smart (amongst dinos anyway) amd had eye's that had a fairly large field of vision allowing them to hunt prey, as well as coordinate with family members as it is believed they may have hunted in family units. Though I did not here that T-rex's had feathers at a young age, but did know that nearly all of the raptors did
It's all rubbish I say. The kind folks who discovered T-Rex are the ones who decided that she was the Tyrant Lizard King. It would make sense given that you would expect that paleontologists would have been the experts on the subject of Dinosaurs. But the science didn't really exist in their day. T-Rex was made out to be this huge hulking and slow monster that dragged it's tail on the ground. Times have changed as we learned more.
The argument over apex predator or scavenger has been going a while, and will continue on to the future.
It's not a wide field of vision that T-Rex is known for, it's known for it's amazing and uncommon binocular vision. T-Rex had the ability to judge how far away something was. They also had just amazing smell.
But the argument for scavenger I think is stronger than the argument for predator. T-Rex had a vulture's brain for crying out loud. Add a body structure that we see over time (6 million years) evolving to walk long distances instead of running... it's really fascinating stuff though. The whole debate is.
About juveniles, yeah that's awesome too. They looked different enough from adults that for a very long time they were classified as a separate species from T-Rex.
And about Dino's becoming birds.
I remember reading somewhere about tissue that was recovered from a T-Rex bone. Included was some red blood cells which were very similar to Ostrich's red blood cells. T-Rex specifically has been called genetically a cross between a chicken and a newt.
It's all just so hardcore I love this.
Walk? I have read and seen on several programs that they could get upto 30mph or so. Granted, I have seen programs where they feature T-rex as a slow moving scavenger. My question is, why the hell does a scavenger need to be so big? Look at the skull, you don't need a great sense of smell to locate a rotting corpse, but you do if you are looking for a creature that is living and on the move. Same goes for the vision. Sure some scavengers have good vision, but look at hawks, falcons, and eagles. They hunt with extrodinary vision. And considering that these birds are the descendents of the dinos, especially the meat eating ones, I would really have to pull for T-rex being a predator.
And who needs arms when you have a head that big, teeth that long, and wide enough to tear a man sized whole out of a Brontosaurus/Apatasaurus.
