For a long time, paleontologists thought that the famous, long-extinct apex predator, the Tyrannosaurus rex, may have chased its prey at high speeds. Children’s books and movies often showed the dinosaur sprinting at a terrifying pace; you might remember scenes from the 1993 film Jurassic Park in which a massive T. rex chases characters who are escaping in a Jeep that they’re driving as fast as they can.
But in the past few decades, paleontologists have found that this wasn’t exactly accurate — and it’s one of a number of ideas we’ve long held about these ancient creatures that are being reshaped by modern science.
“After really sort of ground truthing, figuring out how much bone and tissue needs to be on the animal to reach a particular speed with enough power, people realized Tyrannosaurus probably didn’t run more than 20, 25 miles per hour,” says Jack Tseng, a UC Berkeley vertebrate paleontologist and functional morphologist.
Tseng, who studies the relationship between an organism’s physical structure and its function in the environment, says paleontologists figured out that T. rex were slower than once believed by studying living bipedal birds, like chickens and ostriches. Because paleontologists can’t study the soft tissue of extinct animals, like their muscles or their digestive physiology, they rely instead on living animals, like birds, crocodiles and mammals, to provide clues.
In the past few decades, with the advance of imaging technology and the ability to share research across the globe, paleontologists have made leaps in their knowledge of prehistoric animals. It’s changing the popular images we hold about what dinosaurs looked like and how they lived.
And those findings, Tseng says, also hold powerful lessons for what it means to imagine our earth millions of years in the future.