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Cretaceous Quotes

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Cretaceous Quotes

“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
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“It goes without saying, but T. rex was huge: adults were about forty-two feet (thirteen meters) long and weighed in the ballpark of seven or eight tons, based on those equations from a few chapters ago, which calculate body weight from the thickness of the thighbone. These proportions are off the charts for carnivorous dinosaurs. The rulers of the Jurassic—the Butcher Allosaurus, Torvosaurus, and their kin—got up to about thirty-three feet (ten meters) long and a few tons—monsters to be sure, but they had nothing on Rex. After temperature and sea-level changes ushered in the Cretaceous, some of the carcharodontosaurs from Africa and South America got even bigger than their Jurassic predecessors. Giganotosaurus, for example, was about as long as T. rex and may have reached about six tons. But that’s still a good ton or two lighter than Rex, so the King stands alone as the biggest purely meat-eating animal that lived on land during the time of dinosaurs, or indeed at any time in the history of our planet.”

DinosaursPaleontologyT RexCretaceous
Book:The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World
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“These are feathers. Not the quill-pen feathers that make up the wings of today’s birds but simpler ones that look more like strands of hair. These were the ancestral structures that bird feathers evolved from, and it is now known that many (and perhaps all) dinosaurs had them. Yutyrannus and Dilong establish beyond a doubt that tyrannosaurs were among these feathered dinosaurs. Unlike birds, tyrannosaurs certainly were not flying. Instead, they probably used their feathers for display or to keep warm. And because both a large tyrannosaur like Yutyrannus and a small tyrannosaur like Dilong have feathers, this implies that the common ancestor of all tyrannosaurs had feathers, and therefore that the great T. rex itself was most likely feathered, too.”

DinosaursPaleontologyJurassicCretaceous
Book:The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World
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