The Most Accurate T. rex Ever Reconstructed?

Tyrannosaurus Rex the legendary king of dinosaurs has undergone several dramatic revisions in apparent since it was first recognized as a new species back in 1905 you're probably familiar with the outdated reconstructions of this animal and the story of how it was discovered to be a more active horizontal standing creature leading to our up-to-date relatively accurate understanding of this dinosaur you may also be familiar with the video game Soria it's a project that aims to simulate the ancient Hell Creek Formation of North America to give players an authentic representation of what this place would have been like 66 million years ago in the game you play as the dinosaur that must survive from a hatchling to an adult and he must hunt find water and avoid predators in order to survive well recently the team working on Soren have revealed their massive year-long project in a blog post the complete redesigning of their games t-rex and it might just be the most accurate Tyrannosaurus anyone's ever created so why did they completely redesign it there used to be a partially feathered t-rex that was being used in the game but it was decided it was time to update to keep in line with recent developments in June of 2017 a fateful paper was published that shook up the world of dinosaur paleontology phil bell and colleagues described the fossilized remains of skin and skin impressions from various Tyrannosaur taxa including Daspletosaurus Gorgosaurus and tyrannosaurus itself and what did they find no evidence of feathering just a reptilian like scaly skin now I myself was admittedly a big fan of the feathered t-rex so many of us had gotten used to seeing and like a lot of people I was initially skeptical of this study a common argument made by son was that the skin impressions from t-rex were from regions we already knew to be devoid of feathers such as the tail and that the paper didn't change anything about what we knew this animal to have looked like as the saurian devs say themselves this explains why their previous design was partially scaled in areas such as the tail and underbelly taphonomy was also blamed for the lack of preserved feathers with suggestions being made that perhaps these animals were feathered in life but for whatever reason the feathers had just not been preserved like the scales however the Sauron team make an excellent case for why this is not likely to be true the traces of scales that were identified in Tyrannosaurus itself were also from the neck and pelvic regions in addition to the tail and the closely related albertasaurus and Tarbosaurus show scales from the chest region this is a very broad distribution of scales across most of the body and it seems far more likely that this indicates a full body covering of this type of integumentary somewhere in the gaps between therefore as the sovereign bloc states the simplest most parsimonious conclusion is the Tyrannosaurus Rex and probably other tyrannosaurids too were fully covered in small scales that resemble the reticulate of bird feet there's another good reason for welcoming back scaly tyrants though which the blogpost also explains not only do we have direct evidence of the kind of integrant these animals possessed but it also makes sense for them to lack feathers when you consider the biomechanical side of things to research by paleontologists Scott Hartmann who is also one of the consultants for the t-rex redesign has indicated that animals tend to stop gaining an advantage from insulating integument once they reach sizes of between one and three metric tons depending on the environment they live in and if the animal is not benefiting from such integrant airy structures they're very likely to be selected against and eventually most be lost we can see this occurring in our modern animals too especially in the case of large bodied mammals such as elephants that have lost the majority of their fur so a large Tyrannosaur would actually be under selection pressure to lose any feathers that may be ancestral to explain it and that's another good point that the Soron block makes feathering has already been lost several times amongst other lineages of dinosaurs despite it probably being an ancestral condition to the entire clade sauropods other theropods ceratopsians ornithopods and thoria foreigns all lack feathers too so for feathers to be lost in tyrannosaurids doesn't seem all that implausible anyway it's not just the skin they've redone in the process of recreating their Tyrannosaurus the saurian devs made sure to give it accurate musculature with the help of Scott Hartman the team's artist RJ Palmer did an incredible job of drawing every single muscle on this creatures body the blog explains how initially RJ gave the Rex fairly large muscles on the arms however Scott Hartmann recommended they sling them down a bit resulting in relatively skinny looking for lens on this reconstruction seeing as how the exact purpose of this animal's arms in everyday life is still not known for sure there could certainly be a range of different arm muscle sizes plausible for t-rex for example if they were not being used very much or at all and were just vestigial structures they may have had a very small muscle mass and appeared extremely skinny on the other hand if they were being utilized for some of the many purposes that's been suggested for them such as grappling with prey or to help with getting up off the ground they might have had some beef to them but with what we can't you know the arms in the saurian Rex are just about as thick as they can be next we come to the head this has been another contentious factor recently with the publication of another paper in 2017 that came to some very interesting conclusions on what exactly the face of the tyrant's appeared like in life paleontologists Thomas Carr and colleagues described a new species of Tyrannosaur in March of 2017 naming it Daspletosaurus Horner I and provided evidence for being able to devise what sort of integumentary features were present on the head based on bone textures in correlating skull regions this paper stated that the new Tyrannosaur they were describing which is a close relative of t-rex by the way possessed a keratin covering over the Hornets above its eyes as well as tough skin running along the upper surface of the snout in addition to large scales on the sides of the snouts that they compared to those of crocodilians liking crocodilians the authors of the paper suggest that these large scales acted as sensory structures however the problem is the crocodilians don't actually have large flat scales on their faces and their skulls hair are instead covered by a layer composed of tough skin that has cracked over time as the animal has aged resulting in a texture that appears scaly for these reasons the saurian t-rex does not have large flat sensory scales on its face but instead possesses a few ornamental scales similar to those found in certain lizard species unique depressions and ridges on the maxilla support the presence of such an integrant arrangement the keratin sheath on the Hornets and the toughened skin running along the top of the skull do seem to have probably occurred in life and therefore have also been reconstructed the presence or absence of lips has been yet another topic of debate and the Sauron team explains the reasoning for including immobile fleshy soft tissue lips in the block there is research that indicates you can work out what sort of soft tissue and animal had around his mouth based on the number of foramina in a jaw foramina are small holes in the bone and through comparing the number of these structures and t-rex bones to those in living animals it can be reasonably assumed that tyrannosaurs likely had lips similar to those of modern lizards ones that cannot be moved in the way we can move ours but they still cover up the teeth when the mouth is closed now obviously one thing that cannot be absolutely accurate as the coloration of the animal since this is still an unknown aspect for t-rex however RJ Palmer did an excellent job of creating a reasonable yet not boring color scheme for this reconstruction apparently large reptiles such as crocodilians and Komodo dragons with some of the influences for the skin color although there were also two specific animals there were the primary inspirations but no one has yet guessed what they are something perhaps worth mentioning is the recent study published in June of 2018 that found that many dinosaur groups including the tyrannosaurs were likely unable to move their tongues very much comparing them to the relatively immobile tongues of crocodilians so the tongue here might have been recovered as slightly too flexible thought it should really be like though obviously this is a very tiny nitpick anyway I think this reconstruction is an incredible achievement and it's certainly very beneficial for science communication when you can look at a piece of paleo art and then read in so much detail all the evidence and thoughts that has resulted in the animal before you and to me this definitely feels like the closest we've been to seeing what Tyrannosaurus Rex was really like however with science always developing as new evidence comes to light especially in the case of paleontology this design will probably have to change again in the future to remain as accurate as possible clearly this topic is still a fairly controversial one too and I expect many people will have opinions about the new look so feel free to respectfully discuss what you think in the comments I would recommend reading the Soron blog post if you'd like to find out more and there are plenty of relevant research articles cited there before anyone starts criticizing this new rework too much I'll leave you with a quote from consultant Marc Whitten I've got to say that there aren't many paleo projects where this much attention is given to produce incredible animal appearances to naysayers I'd be asking can you do something better with the data we have to hand because if not it's time to stop sniping and appreciate the work that's gone into this project thank you for watching this video I hope you enjoyed it and learned something new if you'd like to find out more about our world its history and the wonderful life that surrounds us all please feel free to subscribe to the channel if you think we deserve it and if you would like to see more from us [Music] you

Channel: Ben G Thomas

Views: 689,636

Rating: 4.8269005 out of 5

Keywords: Biology, Science, Paleontology, Palaeontology, Dinosaurs, Animals, Nature, Wildlife, Ben, Thomas, Prehistory, Anatomy, Fossil, Bones, t-rex, tyrannosaurus, saurian game, feathers, scales

Id: pG5sbVN3tI8

Length: 10min 2sec (602 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 14 2018