How Many T Rexes Roamed Earth? Billions
A breakthrough new study has satisfied the long unanswered question of how many T. Rexes lived on Earth in their time, finding that approximately 2.5 billion roamed the Earth over the span of 2½ million years.
In the study published Thursday in the journal Science, paleontologist Charles Marshall and a team of his students used statistics, computer simulations and an ecological formula to estimate the number of T. Rexes that lived at a given time. “The project just started off as a lark, in a way,” said Marshall, director of the University of California Museum of Paleontology, the Philip Sandford Boone Chair in Paleontology, and UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology and of earth and planetary science, in a statement accompanying the study.
While the new formula is a huge step forward, Marshall acknowledges the figure is an estimate and has room for error. They believe that there were probably 20,000 adult T. Rexes at a given time, with a 95% confidence range that the true number lies between 1,300 and 328,000. Therefore, there could have been approximately 140 million to 42 billion T. Rexes across the entire Cretaceous period.
Paleontologist Charles Marshall said he expects much dispute over the findings, but he is confident that his method will persevere and become very useful in estimating extinct populations.
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