If one Tyrannosaurus rex — the school bus-sized meat-eating dinosaur that stalked the Cretaceous Period landscape — seems impressive, how about 2.5 billion of them?
Researchers on Thursday unveiled the first calculation of the total T. rex population during the estimated 2.4 million years that this fearsome species inhabited western North America during the twilight of the age of dinosaurs.
They considered factors including the size of its geographic range, its body mass, growth pattern, age at sexual maturity, life expectancy, duration of a single generation and the total time that T. rex existed before extinction 66 million years ago. They also heeded a doctrine called Damuth's law linking population to body mass: the bigger the animal, the fewer the individuals.