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Re: "Super rex"




There is UCMP 118742. A single bone (a tooth-bearing maxilla), it is not known for certain if it is in fact _T. rex_, but it is 29% longer than the equivalent bone from AMNH 5027 (in case you're not up on the specimen numbers, 5027 is the skeleton most people think of when they think of predatory dinosaurs -- the display specimen in the American Museum of Natural History's Hall of Saurischian Dinosaurs, formerly in the Hall of Late Dinosaurs in a more artificial pose, which is how most people probably remember it). Gregory Paul estimated in 1988 that 118742, in life, may have been 12 tonnes in mass and 13,6 m (about 45 ft) long. He also guesses that if 118742 is indeed _Tyrannosaurus rex_, then all the other known big specimens may just be subadults, and it may have been fairly common for _T. rex_ to get up to 15 tonnes, with an occasional 20-tonne behemoth that would probably have been too rare for us to ever find a fossil of it.

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--Sean
http://www.livejournal.com/users/spclsd223/


I wouldn't gloss too much over absolute sizes, our sampling of Tyrannosaurs is just to small to make any absolute remark on what maximum adult size it might had reached. As we can see from other species, there is usually quite a large range in size differences even in adults, so any absolute size measurements are pretty meaningless, if not attract an inordinate amount of attention from people. Unless T.rex fossils were as common as Protoceratops, it would be impossible to tell. After all, even Homo sapiens sapiens exibit an typical adult size range of 1.5-1.8 meters, and that's leaving out people who are below and above the range, which we do know exist. That said, "Sue" could simply be just the Tyrannosaur version of a 1.6 meter human, or more or less. We just don't have enough data to figure it out.


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