![]() ![]() Perhaps the arms shrank over the couple of million of years that the species existed, to get out of the way during pack feeding. rexes descended on a carcass with their massive heads and bone-crushing teeth. rex's arms shrank in length to prevent accidental or intentional amputation when a pack of T. In his paper, Professor Padiana floats his new hypothesis – T. rex to get up from the ground, holding down prey, stabbing enemies, and even pushing over a sleeping Triceratops at night, like cow-tipping.Īlso, some paleontologists have proposed that the arms had no function at all, so we shouldn't be concerned with them. Over more than a century, other proposed explanations for the short arms included waving for mate attraction or social signalling, serving as an anchor to allow T. rex, and certainly too weak to exert any control over a mate. rex's arms are too short to go around another T. This is analogous to some sharks and rays' pelvic claspers, which are modified fins.īut Osborn provided no evidence, and Professor Padian has noted that the T. rex, hypothesised that the short arms might have been 'pectoral claspers' – limbs that hold the female in place during copulation. rex fossils in 1900, he thought the arms were too small to be part of the skeleton.Īt the time, his colleague, Henry Fairfield Osborn, who described and named T. When the great dinosaur hunter Barnum Brown discovered the first T. rex so ridiculously short, but the answer was always, 'No-one knows'. When teaching a freshman seminar called The Age of Dinosaurs, Professor Padiana would always be asked by undergraduates why the arms of T. 'So, it could be a benefit to reduce the forelimbs, since you're not using them in predation anyway.' 'What if your friend there thinks you're getting a little too close? They might warn you away by severing your arm,' he said. 'You have a bunch of massive skulls, with incredibly powerful jaws and teeth, ripping and chomping down flesh and bone right next to you. 'What if several adult tyrannosaurs converged on a carcass?' he said. The answer came to him after other paleontologists unearthed evidence that some tyrannosaurids hunted in packs, not singly, as depicted in many paintings and dioramas. Professor Padian noted that the predecessors of tyrannosaurids had longer arms, so there must have been a reason that they became reduced in both size and joint mobility. The new study was led by paleontologist Kevin Padiana, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a curator at the UC Museum of Paleontology (UCMP).
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