How Many Tyrannosaurus Rex Walked the Earth?

Tyrannosaurus rex spanned all of ancient North America, and about 20,000 lived at once.

T. Rex - shutterstock 696880552
(Credit: Herschel Hoffmeyer/Shutterstock)

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During 2.4 million years of existence on Earth, a total of 2.5 billion Tyrannosaurus rex ever lived, and 20,000 individual animals would have been alive at any moment, according to a new calculation method we described in a paper published on April 15, 2021 in the journal Science.

To estimate population, our team of paleontologists and scientists had to combine the extraordinarily comprehensive existing research on T. rex with an ecological principle that connects population density to body size.

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