The ferocious Tyrannosaurus rex has been depicted as the top dog of the Cretaceous, ruthlessly stalking herds of duck-billed dinosaurs and claiming the role of apex predator, much as the lion reigns supreme in the African veld.
But a new census of all dinosaur skeletons unearthed over a large area of Eastern Montana shows that Tyrannosaurus was too numerous to have subsisted solely on the dinosaurs it tracked and killed with its scythe-like teeth.
Instead, argue paleontologists John “Jack” Horner from the Museum of the Rockies and Mark B. Goodwin from the University of California, Berkeley, T. rex was probably an opportunistic predator, like the hyena in Africa today, subsisting on both carrion and fresh-killed prey and exploiting a variety of animals, not just large grazers.
“In our census, T. rex came out very high, equivalent in numbers to Edmontosaurus, which many people had thought was its primary prey,” said Horner, curator of paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Mont., and Regents Professor at Montana State University. “This says that T. rex is not a cheetah, it’s not a lion. It’s more like a hyena.”
“This putative apex predator is as abundant in the upper layers of the Hell Creek Formation as the herbivores, its reputed primary food source,” added Goodwin, a curator in UC Berkeley’s Museum of Paleontology and assistant director of the museum. “And it’s even more plentiful in the other two-thirds of the formation. This supports the view that T. rex benefited from a much wider variety of food sources than live prey.”
The dinosaur census in the Hell Creek Formation of Montana, which dates from 65-95 million years ago, was begun in 1999 by Horner and Goodwin with the financial and occasional field support of Nathan Myhrvold, former chief technology officer for Microsoft Corp. and co-founder of Intellectual Ventures of Bellevue, Wash. The results, authored by Horner, Goodwin and Myhrvold, were published Feb. 9 in the open-access journal PLoS ONE.
Normally, Goodwin said, top predators are one-third or one-fourth as abundant as their prey, because of the larger energy needs of carnivores. Opportunistic hunters like the hyena, however, can be twice as abundant as the top predators.
“If you count the lions and the leopards and the cheetahs in the Serengeti, the number still does not equal the number of hyenas, because hyenas have a much wider food source,” Horner said. “Cheetahs, for example, only go after things that are really fast. They don’t eat turtles. But a hyena will eat a turtle, or anything else that it can catch or is dead.”
Similarly, T. rex was eating anything it could, he said. “There’s no evidence that T. rex could run very fast, so it wasn’t out there being a cheetah. If it could get a sick animal, it would.”
Horner suggests that juvenile and young adult T. rex may have been primarily flesh eaters, while the older adults, which developed proportionally larger, bone-crushing teeth as they aged, also consumed the bones and marrow of their prey.
Hell Creek Formation
Horner and Goodwin, together and separately, have been digging for dinosaurs in Eastern Montana for decades. The fossils date from a time when the area bordered an inland sea, which periodically advanced and withdrew over coastal plains, depositing sediment that was later exposed and heavily eroded. When Horner started his census of dinosaurs in the Hell Creek Formation around Fort Peck Lake in 1999, he teamed up with Goodwin to re-examine some of the dinosaurs discovered in the area.
Since then, through lab analysis and annual summer digs, they have shown that one named species, Torosaurus, was just a big, aged Triceratops; two dome-headed dinosaurs, Dracorex and Stygimoloch, were merely younger members of the genus Pachycephalosaurus; and the so-called Nanotyrannus was just a juvenile T. rex.
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Tim B of WA 11:06PM February 25, 2011