Morphospecia theory says the t-rex was the carnivorous king at all stages of life

A study published this week shows how the tyrannosaurus consumed different resources at various stages of growth. Modern meat-eating mammals can easily be categorized into a table showing the average size of adults – each of these animals has a unique effect on its own ecosystem. Considering the average size of adult dinosaurs, there appears to be a huge gap in the middle of the graph from smallest to largest.

A gap exists in the table of adult carnivorous dinosaurs for each of the three main periods of the Mesozoic. The Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous are seriously lacking in mid-size “meat-eating meat-asaurine” (as Ariana Richards’ Lex called them in Jurassic Park).

Why in modern times do we have carnivores in a neat range, from small to the size of a lion, but in the days of dinosaurs we didn’t have any? Researchers at the University of New Mexico and the University of Nebraska have proposed a new theory: morphospecia.

ABOVE: Fig. 3 The divide between dinosaurs and modern carnivorous mammals. (A) Carnivorous mammals of Kruger National Park organized on a mass scale. (B) Carnivorous dinosaurs of the Dinosaur Park Formation if the largest carnivore was on the scale of Kruger’s largest mammalian carnivore. Infants (gray) of the larger species shown below adult show a need for relative growth. IMAGE, DESCRIPTION: Department of Biology at UNM.

You may have heard of the change from the old way of thinking about dinosaurs and the new, the change over the past few decades that has reduced the number of individual species of dinosaurs from many to … much less than it is. never suspected it before. If you’ve never seen the TED Talk with Jack Horner on ‘Shape-Changing Dinosaurs’ I suggest you take the time to do so – it’s one of the most watched TED Talks in history. TED Talks.

Keep that in mind as you read the rest of the article published by the researchers this week (as noted above). The old way of looking at each individual set of bones as a new dinosaur allowed scientists to see a much more “complete” size range of dinosaurs, as we see with carnivores in modern times. When people like Jack Horner came along, that theory was shattered.

Now, with this latest research, morphospecia theory makes sense of the broken pieces of this puzzle. We don’t see meat-eating dinosaurs that fill all sizes, from smallest to large, because dinosaurs like the T-rex were there, capitalizing on their full range of sizes how they grew from tiny baby, just out of an egg, to the biggest meat eater of them all.

The Tyrannosaurus was such an efficient carnivore that it had a significant impact on the ecosystem it lived in at every stage of its growth. Why have midrange carnivorous dinosaurs when you could just have more T-rex?

For more information, take a look at the article “The Influence of Juvenile Dinosaurs on Community Structure and Diversity” as published in Science. This article was written by Katlin Schroeder, S. Kathleen Lyons and Felisa A. Smith. The research can be found with the DOI code: 10.1126 / science.abd9220 as published in Science Volume 371, Number 6532, February 26, 2021.