T. rex still reigns as the king of dinosaurs, according to scientists who on Monday argued against a contentious hypothesis advanced this year that the mighty meat-eater Tyrannosaurus should be recognized as three species and not just one.
"The evidence needs to be convincing, and to suddenly divide such an iconic animal like T. rex, which has been known for over a hundred years, into different species requires a high burden of proof. It is true that there is variation in the size and shape of T. rex bones, but in our new study we show that this variation is minimal," said University of Edinburgh paleontologist Steve Brusatte, a co-author of the new study published in the journal Evolutionary Biology.
The new study looked at intra-species variation in thighbone thickness in four other meat-eating dinosaurs and 112 species of living birds, descendants of small feathered theropods, finding that Tyrannosaurus variations were unexceptional. Tyrannosaurus roamed western North America during the Cretaceous Period at the twilight of the dinosaur age before an asteroid struck Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula 66 million years ago, dooming the dinosaurs."Tyrannosaurus rex remains the one true king of the dinosaurs. It is the only species of giant apex predator dinosaur that lived at the end of the Cretaceous in North America," Brusatte added.
"There is something about beloved T. rex that causes people to become agitated to a degree not seen with other paleotaxa . Had our paper been about the species of, say, the also gigantic Argentinian theropod Giganotosaurus there very likely would not have been so much fuss and bother," Paul added.
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