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+---- Thread: Oldest known theropod dinosaur gives insight into how these large carnivores grew (/topic-oldest-known-theropod-dinosaur-gives-insight-into-how-these-large-carnivores-grew)
Oldest known theropod dinosaur gives insight into how these large carnivores grew - DinoFan83 - 01-02-2021
Link.
This discovery suggests that the T. rex specimens Sue and Scotty are no longer the oldest known theropod dinosaurs. A new species of carcharodontosaurid (MMCH-Pv 65, the 'Campanas carcharodontosaurid') seems to beat them both by quite a margin, reaching an age of 50 or more compared to the tyrannosaurids being in their low 30s, and its growth was quite different as well.
While we know that T. rex reached its adult size at 15-18 years old by having very rapid growth spurts of several kilograms a day and then not growing any bigger past that, this carcharodontosaurid is completely different - its growth was very slow throughout its whole lifespan, and only stopped 2-3 years before the animal died. Now while that growth obviously wasn't too slow to actually allow the animal to get as large as it did before it died (given the femoral circumference of 50.3 cm, this specimen is >9.6 tonnes based on the closely related Mapusaurus), that size would have taken quite a while to achieve; based on the >9.6 tonne estimate, the animal would have only grown slightly more than half a kilogram a day as a mean and would have grown about 1/4 as fast as the growth spurts of T. rex.
I think this really shows how diverse some dinosaurs were - despite their very similar ecology as apex predators and similar to significantly greater size than T. rex, what this tells us is that the giant carcharodontosaurids had a completely different way of achieving that giant apex predator spot. And further study of other large theropods may hold more surprises.