“During the final 20 million years of the Cretaceous, tyrannosaurs flourished, ruling the river valleys, lakeshores, floodplains, forests, and deserts of North America and Asia. There is no mistaking their signature look: huge head, athletic body, sad arms, muscular legs, long tail. They bit so hard that they crunched through the bones of their prey; they grew so fast that they put on about five pounds every day during their teenage years; and they lived so hard that we have yet to find an individual that was more than thirty years old when it died. And they were impressively diverse: we have found nearly twenty species of these big-boned tyrannosaurs from the latest Cretaceous, and there are surely many more out there waiting to be discovered. The Pinocchio-nosed Qianzhousaurus, so fortuitously discovered by that still-anonymous backhoe operator at the Chinese construction site, is one of the latest examples. Just as Brown and Osborn grasped over a hundred years ago, when they were the first humans to set eyes on a tyrannosaur, T. rex and its brethren really were the kings of the dinosaur world.” DinosaursPaleontologyT RexCretaceousTyrannosaurus Book:The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World Source: The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World
“there is no denying that by the dawn of the Campanian subinterval of the latest Cretaceous, beginning about 84 million years ago, tyrannosaurs had risen to the top of the food pyramid.” DinosaursPaleontologyCretaceousTyrannosaurus Book:The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World Source: The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World