T-rex's intense 'growth spurt' in early days contributed to its gigantic size: Study

Researchers have found that the gigantic meat-eating Tyrannosaurus rex depicted extensive growth records due to a massive growth spurt that helped the species achieve mammoth sizes in its early teenage days compared with other theropod families. In a study published on November 24 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, researchers studied the fossils and closely examined growth rings of a group of bipedal dinosaurs. In a unique finding, researchers observed that the predator Tyrannosaurus rex showed sudden and intense growth, aging into a gigantic 42 feet long dinosaur from snout to tail and weighing close to 16,000 pounds.

"We wanted to look at a wide swath of different theropods, two-legged, carnivorous dinosaurs, in order to understand broader patterns of growth and evolution in the group," Tom Cullen, the lead author of a new study in Proceedings of the Royal Society B said.

Scientists stated that the evolution of gigantism among dinosaurs and their huge sizes has long been a subject of intrigue. Researchers aimed to find if the largest bipeds, theropods, all grew into gigantic structures at the same time by observing the fossil record. The performed multi-element histological analyses on the sample of eight dinosaurs from theropod families, with a unique focus on tyrannosaurids and carcharodontosaurids. “We find that in skeletally mature gigantic theropods, weight-bearing bones consistently preserve extensive growth records, whereas non-weight-bearing bones are remodelled and less useful for growth reconstruction,” scientists informed. 

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[Lead author of the study Thomas Cullen at Field Museum. Credit: Twitter/@cullen_thomas]

Further, according to the study, the growth spurt observed in T.Rex specifically was different from the pattern observed in smaller theropods and some other dinosaur clades. Lead author of the study Tom Cullen said, “We particularly wanted to understand how some of them got so big — is the way T rex grew the only way to do it?” Cullen added that the scientists collected the samples with the assistance of Chicago’s Field Museum then-curator of dinosaurs, Pete Makovicky. The giant carcharodontosaurid fossils were used as samples excavated along with the other two Argentinian colleagues Juan Canale and Sebastian Apesteguía.

"We wanted to look at a wide swath of different theropods, two-legged, carnivorous dinosaurs, in order to understand broader patterns of growth and evolution in the group,” Cullen explained.

Observed variety of different bones

Scientists then studied a variety of different bones from a vast range of skeletons to find out how some dinosaurs got this humungous. “All these questions about how theropods grew could impact our understanding of the evolution of the group,” the researchers explained. Through this study, many other critical questions were answered such as how old the animal is, how much it's growing each year and a number of other factors. 

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