Laura is an editor at Live Science. She edits Life's Little Mysteries and reports on general science, including archaeology and animals. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Scholastic, Popular Science and Spectrum, a site on autism research. She has won multiple awards from the Society of Professional Journalists and the Washington Newspaper Publishers Association for her reporting at a weekly newspaper near Seattle. Laura holds a bachelor's degree in English literature and psychology from Washington University in St. Louis and a master's degree in science writing from NYU.
Is the mighty Tyrannosaurus rex really three dinosaur species, as a study claimed earlier this year? Fuggedaboutit, research from a new study says.
However, the lead author of the original study, Gregory Paul, an independent paleontologist, isn't convinced by the new results."[It] is not a proper scientific study," Paul told Live Science in an email. "It comes across as paleopropaganda that appears to be structured to defend T. rex, rather than seriously explore the possibilities that fossil specimens of the genus Tyrannosaurus contained the more than one species that the genus certainly did.
Now, a group of researchers with expertise in theropods — a group of bipedal, largely carnivorous dinosaurs that included T. rex and its close relatives — have done just that. "Their study claimed that the variation in T. rex specimens was so high that they were probably from multiple closely related species of giant meat-eating dinosaur," study co-lead author James Napoli, a graduating doctoral candidate in AMNH's Richard Gilder Graduate School."But this claim was based on a very small comparative sample. When compared to data from hundreds of living birds, we actually found that T. rex is less variable than most living theropod dinosaurs.
Moreover, the researchers of the new study disagreed with how the original paper statistically determined the three species. In the original study, the statistical analysis defined the three groups before the test was actually run, so it could not blindly test the"trio" hypothesis, the authors of the new study said. In the new study, the researchers used a different statistical technique to see how many clusters existed within the data without any prior assumptions.