Studying fossil records allows us to see the arrival and departure of species, the timeline of which marked by mass extinctions and biodiversity explosions.
The world has seen countless species come and go – but without hunting every sample, it a kind of puzzle that tries to estimate the size of the total population of the species from their emergence to extinction. In a new study published in the journal Science, it is probably the most famous dinosaur: Tyrannosaurus rex. Their calculations led to the conclusion that about 2.5 billion people walked the earth during their existence, and that, after all, researchers were able to reach this number by hacking the fossil record.
In order to establish how to calculate the total population of a dead species, it is wise to first observe how we do it for the living, and a little thing called the law of Damuth’s effective here. The law states that the density of the average population can predicted based on physical size, with smaller animals having fewer large animals than large ones.
Think of it as a colony of ants versus a herd of elephants. T. Rex is famous for its body size; it is one of the largest muscle therapies known to science. Combining the species’ paleontological data with Damuth’s law, the researchers estimated that about 20,000 rex survived at any one time during their existence and that they performed their carnivorous duties for about 127,000 generations. Rex brings the size of the total population.
It is difficult to establish a single population density from this data, as it is not just a matter of space and numbers. Researcher author Charles Marshall explained in an email to IFLScience that the urge to arrange meals between livestock and livestock has further “clamped” their distribution. Unfortunately, the existing carnivores here are too fun to gather many transferable insights, but we are going to be extinct. We can compare modern assumptions with Rex. Marshall continued, “Drops of density with body mass – large animals are rare, and there are no terrestrial carnivores today.”
“The largest living carnivore is the polar bear – now there is very little food in the arctic, so it is clear that its population density is our best. Rex Estimates approximately two x. Tigers are about 6 times thicker and lions are about 14 times thicker.” According to the authors of the paper, there is great potential for this approach, who believes that the structure can determine the total number of endangered species – if we have the necessary information. According to Marshall, this includes the body mass of the species, whether it ate meat or plants, and if it was cold or warm-blooded. This information combined with information about it is the geographical range and how long it has lived as a species. The researchers hope that their work will extend to all the dinosaurs that exist in the T rex’s ecosystem. They further hope that their results on the total population compared to known specimens may give an idea of how many dinosaurs that once sank into the Earth turned into easily accessible fossil records.
