Puberty Blues for the T.Rex

An anonymous reader writes "A new press release about Tyrannosaurus Rex shows that they lived fast and died young. Growing at 2kg per day for up to 10 years. Links to summaries on BBC and CNN."

Re:Doesn't that seem a bit high?

[Ayaress]

There have been a lot of people who believe that T.rex was a scavenger for a variety of reasons. They're clearly able to kill by sheer size, but I find it reasonable that that wasn't their main survival strategy.

A sparsely populated scavenger, particularly one that could still kill smaller prey (of course, by "small" in this case I'm still talking about things the size of a Buick) would have a much easier job eating that much.

Also, remember that the animal's their eating (wether scavenged or hunted) were as large, and in some cases much larger, than they were. A dead sauropod could likely feed several T.rex for some time after the kill, in the same way that a wolf pack can spend several days eating a large moose.

Re:Doesn't that seem a bit high?

[Ayaress]

T-Rex could have simply scare away most other predators

I've read that lions will steal kills this way, as well. Some prides of lions almost never made their own kills, but instead waited for hyenas or wild dogs to make a kill, and then moved in. They're a bit bigger than most other animals want to mess with, so they have a good success rate doing this.

Giganotosaurus

[pipingguy]

What about Giganotosaurus [acnatsci.org]?

Re:Cold-blooded, check it and see

[SpaceLifeForm]

Possibly. There has been discussion in recent years that they were warm-blooded in some ways. More info here [uiuc.edu].

Re:What does that say about T. Rex's mortality rat

[Brand X]

we didn't really have much else going for us. We weren't fast enough to catch prey

There's a theory out there that we really were fast enough to catch almost anything...
I've seen it in a few forms, proposed by human biologists [parkwayrunning.org], anthropologists [harvardmagazine.com], and even hard science fiction writers [davidbrin.com].
What's significant, however, is that it frames our ancestors as endurance runners, and suggests that we tended to run down prey by shedding heat better (keep in mind where we evolved) and absorbing and disipating shocks in our legs and spine. There's an interesting parallel between this and the archeological guesswork that led to the conclusions about the slowness of the T-Rex.
We may have evolved intelligence partly because it is far more significant to a strategic hunter than a tactical hunter... after all, instinct works pretty well for tactics, provided they don't change to fast. Look at raptors and seabirds, for instance...
Just a thought...