Tyrannosaurus rex

[Spalea]

About #243: chapter 2

Back to this Jurassic Park 1 scene (7mn.20 sec). Just in front of the T.-rex's snout, he couldn't see you because of the "dead angle", but it could feel you and hear you breathing.
11mn: olfactory lobe of T.-rex, allosaurus, edmontosaurus. Well developed, thus T.-rex was clearly able to sniff you, but relatively to its size the T.-rex's olfactory lobes weren't that big, like the extant crocs for example. And crocs aren't specially scavengers, thus T.-rex wasn't either.
17mn:22 sec: "If you don't move, it will not see you", so was the T.-rex's vision based on movement ? We clearly don't know it. On the other hand, we are sure T.-rex had a binocular vision. Very useful in case of a predatory behaviour.
23mn:40sec: The sclerotic ring arond the eye allows to reconstitute the eye form. Problem, we don't know the T.-rex's sclerotic ring. Only the juvenile gorgosaurus's one. It's small so we believe it was small too for the T.-rex. But it's only a speculation because the gorgosaurus isn't the next of kin of the T.-rex. If the eye was small we can speculate T.-rex was rather diurnal, no more.
26mn:50 sec. The T.-rex's ear lobe isn't developed as it is for the deinonychus or the archaeopteryx, thus the T.-rex wasn't an agile animal, and the stabilisation of its sight  wasn't good. So we can tell that the T.-rex didn't actively hunt, only by ambush. T.-rex was an ambush predator.
Other fact: the T.-rex's cochlea is long, it implies that the communication between them was possible. As the eardrum is big, they can produce low frequency sounds. Thus the T.-rex's roar of the Jurassique Park movies is only a fantasy.
Like the extant crocs, T.-rex has numerous "face biting", bite marks, everywhere on the skull. Social bites among the T.-rex community.

To be continued... Reply