"Long before it's in the papers"
February 22, 2011

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“King” of dinos called more hyena than lion

Feb. 22, 2011
Courtesy of the University of California - Berkeley
and World Science staff

The fe­ro­cious Ty­ran­no­saur­us rex is of­ten de­picted as the bloody top dog of the Cre­ta­ceous pe­ri­od, ruth­lessly stalk­ing herds of duck-billed di­no­saurs.

If this is so, it would seem some­one is now in­sult­ing the king.

Scientists say a cen­sus of di­no­saur skele­tons from all over a swath of east­ern Mon­tana shows that the beast—whose La­tin name means tyrant liz­ard king—was too abun­dant to have lived only on live di­no­saurs it took down with its scythe-like teeth.

This cast of a T. rex is on dis­play in UC Berke­ley's Val­ley Life Sci­ences Build­ing. The orig­i­nal fos­sil ske­l­e­ton from Mon­tana's Hell Creek For­ma­tion is in the Mu­se­um of the Rock­ies in Boze­man, Mont. (Cred­it: Randy Ir­mis)

The ferocious Tyrannosaurus rex is often depicted as the bloody top dog of the Cretaceous period, ruthlessly stalking herds of duck-billed dinosaurs. But a new census of all dinosaur skeletons unearthed over much of eastern Montana, scientists say, shows that the “tyrant lizard king” was too abundant to have lived only on dinosaurs it tracked and killed with its scythe-like teeth. So rather than the “lion” of its realm, the paleontologists say, T. rex was probably more of an “opportunistic” predator. That is, it was like the hyena in Africa, which both hunts live prey and scavenges dead meat, and either way isn’t picky about which animals are its sustenance. “In our census, T. rex came out very high, equivalent in numbers to Edmontosaurus, which many people had thought was its primary prey,” said John “Jack” Horner, curator of paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Mont., and a professor at Montana State University. “This said 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 co-researcher Mark B. Goodwin of the University of California, Berkeley. “And it’s even more plentiful in the other two-thirds of the formation.” Normally, Goodwin said, top predators are one-third or one-fourth as abundant as their prey, because of carnivores’ larger energy needs. 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. The dinosaur census in the Hell Creek Formation of Montana, which dates from 65 to 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 research journal PLoS One. Horner and Goodwin, together and separately, have been dinosaur-digging 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 concluded 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. Once these fossils had been properly identified, Homer and Goodwin said, they catalogued the species and relative ages of known dinosaurs in the formation, which is about 100 meters thick at exposed areas covering some 1,000 square kilometers. The census included only skeletal remains, not teeth, because the paleontologists wanted a record of the maturity of each specimen, and teeth tell little about the age of a dinosaur at death, Goodwin said. “Small juveniles and older adults were relatively rare compared to large juveniles and subadults for all the dinosaurs,” Goodwin said. This could be explained if juveniles lived in other locations, which is not uncommon in some species. The largest adults may simply have been relatively rare. “This adds to an emerging picture of what the dinosaur fauna looked like during the late Cretaceous,” he said. Horner noted the greater variety of dinosaurs in the older sediments, the Lower Hell Creek Formation, compared to the younger “Upper” formation. “Definitely there was a change in population leading up to the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary,” the time when the dinosaurs went extinct due to a presumed asteroid impact, Horner said. “So something was happening to the faunas prior to the impact.. during the 10 million years after dinosaur diversity peaked 75 million years ago, the dinosaurs dwindled pretty fast, and there weren’t many left at the end.”