Discovery Dinosaurs Beyond T Rex

who's the nastiest dinosaur of them all he was named the tyrant Lizard King in 1904 and generations ever since have had little cause to argue about the biggest scariest meat-eater ever Tyrannosaurus Rex he's the real-life monster from central casting the bloodthirsty villain of scores of movies t-rex has become a tool merchants dream product line and lately even an auctioneers multi-million dollar prize so what's the source of T Rex's enduring charm seven tons of carnivorous fury a head the size of a meat locker on a body bigger than a school bus dagger teeth as long as railroad spikes capable of ripping off 500 pounds of flesh in a single bite but two new dinosaurs have been unearthed which may be even larger and just as deadly they were cousins who live half a world away from t-rex and long before it they pose the most serious challenge ever to the throne of the tyrant Lizard King kids sense what many adults have long forgotten the dinosaurs are both monsters of the past and mysteries of the present frightening yet safe far back in the past but still very much alive in their minds even though they've been shrunk stuffed and sold by the millions dinosaurs hold an enduring source of wonder for the child in all of us and the bigger and more terrifying the dinosaur the better loving dinosaurs is not the same as knowing them but once in a while a young admirer will grow up to be a professional dinosaur hunter Phil Curie is one who did he's a paleontologist at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Alberta Canada and the world's leading expert on meat-eating dinosaurs as a child open up a cereal box one day and there's a plastic dinosaur inside the next thing you know my parents to buy cereal like crazy until I could acquire most of the set unfortunately Tyrannosaurus Rex was the one I really wanted because one of my friends had it it was the neat one but today t-rex's reign as king of the meat-eaters is in jeopardy something curry knows better than anyone for almost a century now the most famous dinosaur has unquestionably been Tyrannosaurus Rex the reason for that is that Tyrannosaurus Rex was the largest flesh-eating animal to ever walk the earth and it conjures up an image of absolute terror nevertheless in the last few years two new animals been found in the southern hemisphere and they threatened to throne the king one of T Rex's challengers lived in the lush environment of South America nearly 100 million years ago the other behemoths dominated the river deltas of northern Africa and until recently both Titans were shrouded in mystery this is the big jaw bone of the skull that we found in place Paul Sorvino is a paleontologist from the University of Chicago not only do you see a row of teeth but you see one just beginning a fresh tooth just beginning to emerge here from the socket in 1995 he plotted an expedition to search for one of T Rex's challengers in the Sahara Desert Surenos expedition would trace the path of european scientists who had discovered a giant dinosaur in North Africa in the early 1900s it's a very huge desert and on this edge some 40 years ago French explorers and paleontologists often single-handedly and sometimes by camel had come across teeth of an animal they called and dubbed carcharodontosaurus they named the animal for its razor-sharp teeth and because it resembled a much feared predator of modern day man as the name implies a carcharodon means shark and that's also the the genus name of the of a great white shark living today the function of the teeth in general is very clear therefore slicing their vertical blades that would have just come down like a pair of scissors they were started a small hole here and it would just cut right along when the dinosaur closed his jaws were to snap right through bone and flesh the Explorer is boxed up the bones and took them to Germany to be displayed in a museum but World War Two intervened and in the firestorms of the great air war bombs destroyed the remarkable fossils the only specimen of the giant and the only possible threat to t-rexes reign was buried by rubble following the scientists old maps Sereno would carry on their expedition in the rugged mountains of Morocco his team headed across the desert searching the sands but coming up empty-handed what made it especially tough going in fact it was physically the toughest expedition I've ever run was the fact that you were exploring and looking for fossils on the face of a cliff and your job was to scale that cliff day in and day out in 100 120 degree heat and and basically looking for patches of rock they were exposed that might house the bones of animals that we yet really didn't know much about under the Blazing Sun Sorento lost nearly a pound today weeks had passed and the team had still found nothing they were in their last days of prospecting on high cliffs when Sorento finally found a piece of skull and I turned it over and I saw this hollowing and I knew that right away and also by the sort of the structure of the braincase that we're dealing with a predatory dinosaur and the question was was this the tail end of a skull that had weathered out millions of years ago or was this the tip of a skull the rest of which was in the cliff spread out over the cliff face the team hunted feverishly for matching pieces we were in the last week of the expedition it was it could be a thrilling finale to our expedition I found nothing I came back and I puzzled over this phone almost breathless I went back up the cliff face and that's when I saw perched on a little pedestal of rock that a cut face of bone that matched a piece that I was holding my handles about 20 feet up and scaled back up there and I could fit this piece right on and I knew that the skull was going into the cliff so if you look at this if you guys seen the teeth this is incredible what we eventually did was go into the side of the cliff we had to remove tons of rock over this because the skull kept on going in until we could surround the skull and take it down off the cliff then this is the right cheek bone with all the teeth in it and we can see 1 2 3 is replacing tooth here 4 5 6 7 8 as difficult as it was to excavate the skull it was a bigger problem finding the rest of the animal which was scattered by an ancient river what we had was a big river that was transporting lots of bone matter downstream most of the time we'd find teeth or small pieces of bone broken up and rolled sometimes for as many as 50 miles we unearthed the animal realizing it was a big animal but we didn't really know how large the team was fortunate enough to recover crucial parts of the jaw including the cheek bone called the Jugal which would help them estimate the total size of the skull back in Chicago when the team measured the jaw and its components they discovered that the skull was 15% bigger than the specimens destroyed during World War two back in the laboratory we began to open up the jackets and and by the time we had thus cut the the big jaw exposed we had jaws of other predatory dinosaurs in the laboratory and it just it was so monstrous compared these other jaws that we began to realize just in fact how big this animal was and remember calculating one day once we got the jaw piece and the Jugal and realizing that the skull was was over five feet long this was an enormous animal on the other side of the globe in Patagonia Argentina another dinosaur find would startle the world this barren ground is rich hunting for dinosaur fossils the wind constantly blows across these Plains exposing layers of rock 100 million years old it was here in 1993 that an amateur dinosaur hunter Ruben carlini stumbled across a huge bowl he called Rodolfo Correa a South American paleontologist with a passion for dinosaurs for me dinosaurs is the most important thing in the world I've worked with dinosaur I wanted to do since I was a kid as Korea and his team headed across the badlands he often thought about what life was like millions of years ago I said was arriving into the field I can imagine all this giant walking around and shaking the earth compared to Paul Serena's excavation high up in the cliffs of Africa Korea's was less demanding and more rewarding not only were the bones lying near the surface but they formed an astonishingly large percentage of the dinosaur skeleton first time I came here was in August of 1993 in that time we spent four weeks working in this side and we just recovered about 70 percent of the animal now we are looking for some missing part of a skillet down because we didn't find yet any part of the arms of the animal of the feet of the animals in just over a month the crew dug up almost the complete dinosaur among the still missing bones is the Jugal which is just as important to Korea as it had been to Paul Sorrento also like sureños find Korea's dinosaur was discovered in an ancient riverbed which created problems in finding pieces of the skull we saw that the currents of the stream affected more the head part of the body than to the tail the the whole skull was discovered completely disarticulated and the pieces every piece is every piece of the skull was found separate from the others to raise money needed for the reconstruction of the dinosaur Korea teamed up with an American science writer and dinosaur popularizer Don lesson you want to try finally at you go please lesson would help bring the discovery to the world's attention now if I knew what I was doing and I had phenomenal luck I'd find the Jugal bone that's what I'm most hoping to find here and run off up to I think it's the one missing bone from the skull that would tell us even more definitively about the shape of the entire skull the death of all dinosaurs is a source of endless mystery and speculation and despite Korea's discovery of a nearly intact skeleton he will never know why this animal chose this very spot to lay down and died what we do know is that it wouldn't see the light of day for another 100 million years after the bones were excavated Korea trucked them to his laboratory where technicians spent months cleaning them Korea called in Maria Gravano a local art teacher to carefully sculpt missing parts she based her work on Korea's educated guesses and on bones the team had already excavated then temporary casts were taken and transported to a nearby museum where they were laid out alongside the real bones on a dirt floor to form the first look at the full dinosaur compared to the head of the dinosaur the back end was preserved nearly intact you calm hemo arches like fallen the Chevron's these little pieces that stick down from the tail to me it's unusual to find so many of them in such good preservation we were very lucky that the tail was found practically in a stipulation and the sequence of the burglary was very well preserved and beside every birthday ray we found the different all of the sharers that we get now we're just dealing with a lightweight cast here but how much would this have weighed in real life oh the mdrd a real bone the fossil loam could be about 80 90 kilos and weighs 200 pounds right the shape of the lake bone was Korea's first clue that he was dealing with a new and unfamiliar animal one worthy of its own name it's very funny at the moment that you have to decide the name of the dinosaur because you have a huge responsibility on your shoulders do you know that if you are right in proposal and Yugi knows that name will we preserve in the future forever choosing the name of the Nexus is like bringing a new baby to a world a big baby Giganotosaurus means giant reptile from the South this is not the real head I realize no it is not and also it's not the real the actual idea that we get about the size of the skull of Giarrusso knows this this this gas is showing our first guest about the size the length of the skull of general services you get too small right yes an accurate cast of the head would be crucial to solving the mystery of just how big Giganotosaurus was after much meticulous searching Rudolfo Korea and his crew finally found the prize more than 70% of the Giganotosaurus skull including the entire brain case so we found right here we found the brain case listen to the to the wall to assemble a replica of Giganotosaurus Korea called in Mariel dunno who has been reconstructing dinosaurs for more than three decades she compares this present-day dig to the earliest days of dinosaur hunting in the American West it's like the 1880s my thoughts are finding this vast amount of material new material and all over this kind of is never been known before to help Korea get a more accurate measurement of Giganotosaurus O'Donnell created molds of the bones and brought them back to her lab in Los Angeles there with the help of a team of workers she began to cast the whole dinosaur painstaking work that would bring Giganotosaurus to life in three dimensions several months into the project Maria Gravano arrived from Argentina to help link her sculpted bones with Oh Don OHS cast most people think that you find a complete a dinosaur all laid out all you have to do is is clean it off put it together and put it on display that just never happens and there are always missing parts parts that need reconstruction so I learned to model and to make molds on missing parts only a handful of people in the world specialized in casting dinosaurs Mary O'Donnell has been at it for over 30 years in 1966 when the LA County found it to Mexico that was the largest skull in existence at that time and I got to work on that and I thought that is the best thing that ever happened to me it'll never happen again after months of difficult work the final cast of the head is ready to be made polyester resin thickened with talc and white paint is brushed on the solid areas of the rubber mold this material just painted by itself is not very strong it'll be backed with glass cloth strips of glass cloth and then it becomes very strong once the glass cloth is applied the resin begins to dry a process which can take an entire day and while the resin dries O'Donnell and the crew work quickly to clamp and bolt the many sections of the beasts head together Rudolfo Correa has come from Argentina to check in on the process and help pull the mold we're all feeling pretty apprehensive about this first cast it's the first reconstruction for this skull it's the largest of its kind it's an entirely new animal we're hoping very much that the cast will come out good and be a success finally after a half a year the time has come to pull the mold I'll see if they're hired as paid Ahava huge with a lot of under hangs a lot of nooks and crannies that are going to be difficult to separate the mold from the cast yeah I'll get your fingers in here the fingers in here and I'll pull and I say pull it it means we'll be pulling on that the under a great deal of stress to remove the silicone rubber from the cast Oh God it's Oh beautiful just beautiful when the upper jaw was finally revealed it was perfect you've sweat a little blood over that I'll tell you this is better than I expected it really is for Mary O'Donnell reconstructing Giganotosaurus was the culmination of a life's dream it's terrific it's like an out-of-body experience but it's a reality that you're seeing something that no human eyes have seen before and it lived in this case a hundred million years ago and it's a rare privilege that those of us who work in this field have back in Chicago Paul Sorrento and his team were busy putting together the bones from Morocco a puzzle made more difficult to solve because so many pieces were missing through patience the graduate students and myself over a couple of months slowly like a porcelain plate dropping on the floor we put that porcelain plate back together and that and that was the whole midsection of the skull this is really fantastic although they'd found only half a skull in artists could flesh out a replica of the full head of kakarotto Soros and Sorrento could make some impressive estimates of its overall size I think we're talking about a skull that is is is clearly five-and-a-half feet long and we're talking about a body length of between 45 and 50 feet but the complete cast of the Giganotosaurus head measured in at just over six feet long half a foot longer than the largest t-rex the race to dethrone the king of dinosaurs continued Kariya and his team brought the Giganotosaurus head to New York to be viewed at a conference at the American Museum of Natural History even New Yorkers who thought they'd seen everything were surprised at the site and at the conference the group of paleontologists and artists was equally impressed Wow Marlys gladden gets the whole business so amazed it's absolutely monstrous big teeth and we find teeth in Utah that size but not a complete skull well I've always liked big meat-eaters I grew up in this Museum in New York I grew up with this t-rex in New York the first t-rex ever mounted very fond of it I just looked at the skull for the first time and I'm overwhelmed to see it in person it's one of the most amazing skulls I've seen I've saw the t-rex skull which I grew up with looking at t-rex is but to see this creature which is much bigger it's astonishing the kid in me really is interested in which one's the biggest and I think we all want to know what was the biggest meat-eater among the dinosaurs the challenge had been made Giganotosaurus and kakarotto Soros two ferocious giant meat-eaters both large perhaps larger than t-rex but could either one of the new monsters truly lay claim to t-rex's title as king of the meat-eating dinosaurs and which one would it be as word spread of the discovery of two giant dinosaurs which might be thrown t-rex paleontologists wanted to know how they evolved and how closely they were related both kakarotto Soros and Giganotosaurus walked the earth about 100 million years ago their bodies were similar in shape but one lived in Africa the other in South America how did to such similar animals evolved so far apart 145 million years ago when the landmass was one supercontinent the largest predator was a 30 to 40 foot long meat-eater called Allosaurus if you want to catch an Allosaurus today the place to go is central Utah the cleveland lloyd quarry near price has produced a phenomenal jumble of alice or bones in the last two decades enough to remake 44 dinosaurs this makes the the blood pressure of a dinosaur hunter rise his heart starts to beat fast this is a paradise for a dinosaur hunter the paleontologist in charge of the site is dawn Virge and a concentration of the bones right here that would go up to say 50 bones per square yard I think maybe it was a some kind of a lake or springfed log and had to have something to entice these meat-eaters a abate for the trap maybe like cheese for mouse in this case plant eating dinosaur that was stuck out here and evolved and so this bipedal carnivore looks out there not here separate and he gets stuck in this ball but what was the relationship if any between the Allosaurus and the two new Giants of the south all I can say is her certainly related their cousins paleontologist Bob Bakker believes that a more mysterious Jurassic cousin Megalosaurus may have been the largest of all the meat-eaters Bakker runs the tape Museum in Casper Wyoming Allosaurus I only had one animal to fear there was a rare predator even bigger than they were that predator was a Megalosaurus still much of a mystery we just call it they get a complete skeleton of Megalosaurus has never been found but Bakker has a few impressive parts including the jugo which he uncovered in the mountains of Wyoming this is part of the mega-resort it doesn't look like much it's a rib shaft that fit in the rear of the torso around the guts but which but spectacular is the rib keeps on going and going and going and going and going and going this rib is a 14 feet long which means the guts if you added the the belly are 6 feet deep and if you add at the top of the backbone you have 8 and a half feet of torso that's huge that's as big as any guy can note over carcharodon toe or any t-rex so this mystery Jurassic dinosaur Big Ed is right up there with the largest big doesn't necessarily mean tougher see these holes those are wounds this thing got bit if they both lived at the same time who would win a fight between Megalosaurus and a t-rex Megalosaurus were close-quarter fighters they were designed to attack in densely bushed densely forested wet terrain their flexible bodies would let them go around trees they're incredible Popeye arms would let them grab a prey close in and slash t-rex is totally different it needs open habitat it's got speed it's got height it's got a powerful bite but it needs room to maneuver so in an open terrain t-rex would beat the Megillah sore but in a barroom brawl in a Jurassic forest the Magnus or could be T Rex as Bakker sees it Megalosaurus is one of the first giant meat eaters from which Allosaurus evolved followed by on separate continents Giganotosaurus and Carcharodontosaurus the mega restores are their own distinct family but they're very close to the root the trunk of the family tree of every single giant meat eater and little meat eater that came afterwards they're the patriarchs of these predators but t-rex evolved on a separate evolutionary branch I have no doubt at all that occurred on a source in chickenosaurus are in the same family Tyrannosaurus is not only in a different family but those families are certainly more remotely related to each other if we look at Giganotosaurus and kakera dinosaurs they're like brother and sister compare that to Tyrannosaurus and it's more like a third or fourth cousin the older Jurassic Giants Allosaurus and Megalosaurus were Lords of a slowly dividing world dinosaur evolution comes in two acts the first act all the world was one stage if you were giant meat-eater a Jurassic meat-eater a Megalosaurus Alice or you could walk and spread your genes from one continent to another every place had the same fauna by the middle of the next dinosaur period the Cretaceous the earth was taking on a more modern shape splitting into two continents north and south the continents are pulling apart you can no longer walk easily from Wyoming to South America or Europe to Africa and that's where Giganotosaurus and Carcharodontosaurus come in they are Gondwana their southern continent specialists they ruled the seashore the lakeshore the flood plains and the southern continents and in North America this very little that's like them but Giganotosaurus and kakarotto soros were very similar animals stocky narrow jawed and sharp tooth too similar for either to have evolved in isolation this similarity suggests that Africa and South America may have been linked by land bridges long into the Cretaceous longer than anyone had previously thought both Giganotosaurus and kakora dinosaurus had evolved with the same weaponry a mouthful of slashing teeth these teeth are sharp very very flat and very sharp so they were just like knives just like we use knife for when we are eating an steak so at the same time they are these teeth are very weak they are never strong there's not as strong like Tyrannosaurus Rex teeth what we're seeing in Giganotosaurus is a mechanism for the animal to come in basically take a big gouge of the side of the prey by slicing with its teeth into the side of the flesh avoiding the ball and then moving back as fast as a cab so that it avoids getting hit or turned on by the animal that it's going after and basically waiting to see the effects and them coming in again and again until it's pretty weakens and falls 35 million years later t-rex was a very different animal just as big perhaps but with a narrower frame smaller front limbs and more robust jaws with this different body came new weapons teeth of a very different design t-rex teeth unlike any other meat-eaters teeth are huge swollen armor piercing spikes not blades they're not knives use their armor piercing bullets for cracking and crushing all of the other giant meat eaters all of them have teeth that are much sharper in the front and back much thinner side to side good for slicing but if they hit a bone they just break that snapped it was T Rex's massive head and jaw muscles which made it a powerful predator obviously most of the work that these animals achieve was with their with their jaws they were running skulls essentially and they attacked with their with their jaws they ripped with their jaws their very strong necks the arms were sort of a supplemental thing running skulls big and ferocious but it makes one under just how smart these animals were and these pieces fit together to find out Paul Sorrento looked inside the skull of Cardona Soros and if you open up the the skull you'll see the cavity inside where the brain would be located they took the skull to the Medical Centre at the University of Chicago now to get an exact shape of that cavity we strapped this back together again Hans took the brain case the bone and sent it through a cat-scan machine the cat scan would give them a three-dimensional cross-section of the brain case and information regarding the actual size of the brain one thing we can see in the CT data is that when when you slice the brain case you can actually see the inside space for where the brain was occupying and we look at that and sort of measure it you can see that the brain on this guy was actually really small at look very reptile-like and you can compare it to other other coniferous dinosaurs and what we did is make in plastic with the cat scan information a model of that space a very exact model so we can know the shape and ultimately the volume of the space rich in house how's the brain but because the cavity was also filled with fluid the brain took up much less than the total space the size of the brain of carcharodontosaurus is about half the volume of what you see here less than the volume of your fist and it would have weighed in at half a pound in order to make comparisons with other species Larson developed software from the cat scan data that would give him a 3d image of the brain of carcharodontosaurus he then discovered evidence of an evolutionary tie between Carcharodontosaurus and one of its ancestors one interesting thing about kakera dinosaurus is that if you compare it to Allosaurus the the brain shapes the range sizes are virtually and even though you have an animal like a carrion Soros which is twice the size of an Allosaurus the brains didn't really change much in terms of scaling he compared its brain with a similar image of t-rex it's in the cerebral cortex where intelligence is centered t-rex had evolved more and had a sizable advantage this area here is where the cerebral hemispheres would be located and when you when you approximate the volumes of each of these two animals you can you can show that the cerebral hemispheres in Tyrannosaurus are approximately 50% larger than those of kakera dinosaurs a pretty amazing different t-rex is brain was also larger than the brain of Giganotosaurus if brain size is not body size were the determining factor t-rex would remain the king over all right now it appears that Giganotosaurus did not have a brain that was anywhere near as large as the brain of Trance or X and consequently we would think that it's a less intelligent animal but relative to its huge size t-rex wasn't a very smart animal its brain was smaller than the brain of an ostrich for example one of the dumbest Birds what really matters is that all of the meat eaters were brainy by dinosaur standards the bottom line is that you just have to be smarter than the prey you're going after and again this is I think a little bit more evidence for suggesting that these were active predatory dinosaurs that they were chasing other animals because they do have brains there are larger than any of the prey that were around at the same times of them t-rex also had another advantage over Giganotosaurus and cacao dot asaurus its eyesight at the Black Hills Institute in South Dakota fossil dealer Neil Larsen has studied the eyesight of some of the largest t-rexes the eyes of a Tyrannosaurus Rex were probably the largest of any land predator that ever lived the only animal there are other animals that have larger eyes such as the giant squid arca two--this and whales have some have larger eyes but as far as eyesight this animal had incredibly keen eyesight when it beaut its prey a wide scold t-rex with its eyes further apart may have had better depth perception helping it judge distances more accurately in contrast Carcharodontosaurus and Giganotosaurus with their narrower skulls and smaller brains may have had a harder time figuring out just how far they were from a potential kill whatever the differences in their eyesight all these predators focused on one thing meat but were they all deadly predators Giganotosaurus and Carcharodontosaurus two huge meat-eating dinosaurs from the south but does big also mean slow one clue would be whether the meat-eaters were warm-blooded allowing them longer periods of activity to find the answer researchers in this laboratory at North Carolina State University studied samples of bone taken from various parts of the body of Giganotosaurus the reason that we were so interested in Giganotosaurus is that it the preservation of this animal is absolutely astounding one of the things that we need in fossil animals is we need a pretty complete skeleton you can't do this type of analysis on just bone fragments or bits of bone using a revolutionary technique William showers and reefs Berek measure the oxygen molecules still present in the dinosaur's bones millions of years after its death okay the measurements revealed an even distribution of heat between the outer extremities of the animal and the core of its body according to their research Giganotosaurus was warm-blooded for the trunk part of the body where we have our ribs in vertebra and all of our you know body organs that there was not very much temperature variability so the body core of this animal was very constant so it had a very constant body temperature and that's typical of warm-blooded animals there wasn't large temperature differences like you'd see in a cold-blooded animal a komodo dragon for example which is a cold-blooded animal has large temperature differences between its tail and its core body and that means Giganotosaurus was like every other meat-eating dinosaur they studied including t-rex warm-blooded like modern birds and mammals that means that it had could be much more active it grew fairly rapidly and it was gonna need a lot of food in essence relative to modern animals if we want to make a comparison Giganotosaurus very likely head to on a daily basis the same amount that perhaps a pole pride maybe too prides of lions would have to eat in addition the discovery suggests something about Giganotosaurus longevity it's hard to tell but it's very likely that these guys lived in the same order of magnitude as modern elephants do so they could live you know maybe 20 to 50 years or something like that as opposed to living 120 years if they happen to be you know with a reptilian metabolic rate although the full lifespan of a Giganotosaurus could have been as long as 50 years it may often have been cut short by its violent lifestyle with all these meat eaters that I have seen we have now excavated five Tyrannosaurus rexes and every one of them shows healed injuries broken bones many broken bones claw marks tooth marks it shows that these animals commonly fought among each other perhaps for food perhaps for mating perhaps over their babies perhaps over just being Friday night do the men who discover them Carcharodontosaurus and Giganotosaurus were vicious hunters I think that this animal was a predator I think that I think that based on on just the the the shearing action of the teeth I I feel that this animal was made to grab something actively and cut off an entire limb and just swallow it whole I don't see as a passive scavenger we are not working without heavy and and slowest cabin share but it was a real hunter I think that Giganotosaurus was an active potater I think that chickenosaurus was enabled to grow to break bones and to eat from dead carcasses but Jack honor one of the world's leading paleontologists dis Riis Horner contends that the giant meteors including t-rex were more often scavengers t-rexes arms first of all they're the same length is mine t-rex is yawns 40 feet long and weighed 12,000 pounds in his arms the same length as mine but when you flush them out we find that this much of the armor actually is encased in muscle and so only this much sticks out and and really can't even put his hands together and something so we can't really use them to grab ahold of anything whatever t-rex was it was a bone-crushing animal and bone crushing is usually not something that that that is attributed to a to a predator predator can just kill its prey eater wants to and leave its the scavengers that come in and crush the bones and take everything that is left other paleontologists see a middle ground the giant carnivores were both predators and scavengers any top predator must do both must be ready to do both and do it well the spotted hyena is a famous scavenger today in Africa but it actively hunts lions are famous hunters but they routinely steal carcasses from hyenas any giant meat-eating dinosaur will kill any giant meat-eating dinosaur for alive today but also take dead bodies the challengers to the throne never met t-rex but if they did who would come out on top so kids are we ready are we ready for the year of the dinosaur finally the public had a chance to see gigolotesaurus go head-to-head with t-rex for the first time Mario da knows full-scale cast of Giganotosaurus was erected inside the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia and the public flocks to the museum to get the first look at the new giant and to decide for themselves who's the king t-rex at zero he's scarier and stronger they pose an enormous skeleton of t-rex was looking on menacingly just a few feet away rats which is really big Phil Koury traveled across the continent to see Giganotosaurus restored for the first time he was eager to know its true size so far it's pretty close to Tyrannosaurus Rex and total body measure the neck vertebrae are a little bit longer but the vertebrae through the main part of the abdomen seem to be about the same length three four eight after taking measurements Curry compared them to his data of other t-rexes he's examined around the world he concluded that gigolotesaurus is just over 40 feet in length slightly longer than the largest D Rex overall then it appears that Giganotosaurus definitely has a longer skull and you would expect that because of the way the musculature is orientated at the back of the head it's got a longer femur but the tibia and the metatarsus are shorter and the overall length is about the same in terms of weight when we look at the circumference of the femur it's a good way to estimate the actual weight of the animal and there's no doubt at all that in that measurement Giganotosaurus seems to come in as a much heavier animal than t-rex and may outweigh it by its as much as 30% and how does notice or as compared to kakarotto source if we look at degenerate asaurus it's about the size of this one we have behind us when we get more we need to get more specimens to be able to say what the range of body size was I think we can clearly say they overlapped and their maximum body size may have been very similar so in the final analysis has t-rex been dethroned as king of the dinosaurs if you ask me and people have they do continuously which of the five or six or seven giant meat eaters is the ultimate king I'd still have to say professor Osborn was right at 1904 when he named this animal Tyrannosaurus Rex the tyrant Lizard King because when push comes to shove this animal bites much harder penetrates more deeply than any other does so has Tyrannosaurus Rex been dethroned I don't think so I think the Tyrannosaurus Rex is still one of the largest maybe not the largest but certainly one of the largest and in terms of its speed in terms of its ability to process meat and in terms of its intelligence this dinosaur is still by far the most sophisticated so as long as we keep looking at more primitive forms like kakera dinosaurs and Giganotosaurus I think that Tyrannosaurus Rex still doesn't have to worry we now know there were dinosaurs larger than t-rex perhaps one day even larger killers will emerge it's likely in fact with a new kind of dinosaur discovered on average every six weeks but until the next rival is discovered there are already enough ancient Giants newfound and familiar to keep us in awe of the terrifying animals which once ruled the earth

Channel: St James Farnworth

Views: 688,357

Rating: 4.6442485 out of 5

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Id: 7DN22Cq1Yhw

Length: 52min 2sec (3122 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 24 2015

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[u/DeeDeeInDC]

I love these 80-90's docs. They're just so full of fluff. lol