Run! Hide! T-rex Even Bigger Than Feared

Steven Spielberg was on to something. In the same vein as his friend George Lucas being prescient, Spielberg knew exactly what he was talking about when he showed us a rearview mirror in Jurassic Park that read "Objects in mirror are closer than they appear." Such is the case with the mighty T-Rex, which just got more mighty.

A new study led by scientists in the U.K. and the U.S. has asserted that Tyrannosaurus rex, the feared carnivore that has been the nightmare of many a Triceratops and young boy, was bigger than we have thought.

It's not like we have these creatures around anymore to do some handy measuring, despite the kind of entertainment that Spielberg and others have given us on the Silver Screen. After all, T-rex and his Cretaceous cousins died out 65 million years ago. (And whether you believe that an asteroid or disease or aliens killed them, they're still long dead.) But we do have these fossils, see, and we do have computers now, see, and so the journal PLos One now reports, thanks to the diligence of these scientists and their computer models, that T-rex could grow nearly 4,000 pounds in a year. The paper asserts that the largest of the nightmarish razor-toothed carnivorous predator could have weighed in at more than 18,000 pounds of muscle — 4,000 pounds more than previously thought.

How have these men and women of science come to this conclusion? So back to the skeletons, and the computers. By taking 3-D laser scans of five mounted skeletons of the big lizards, the scientists had plenty of material for extrapolating — using strict scientific method, of course — and so they went to work, inch by inch, pound by pound, computer model by computer model, crunching the numbers and poring over the details, until they had come up with their conclusions, which are enough to upset the dreams of a whole new generation of young children.

If there's one bright side to these new conclusions, it's that the weight gain eventually caught up with the body type. In other words, the more the T-rex aged, the slower it moved. This is typical of nearly animals, and it must be comforting for us humans to know that T-rex slowed down eventually, although we would do well to remember that the giant beasts could still use their huge hips and tail to propel themselves at up to 25 mph. That's still fast enough to run down most kinds of prey, including those in dreams.