The “Jurassic Park” series of films sparked mainstream interest in paleontology, but, as is so often the case, truth is stranger than fiction, but only slightly.
According to a new study was published in the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences, T. Rex babies hatched from eggs that were about 1.5 foot long and were about 3 feet long at birth — about the size of a husky. A fully grown T. Rex could reach up to 40 feet in length and 13 feet in height.
In “The Lost World: Jurassic Park,” the 1997 sequel, the baby T. Rex is depicted as roughly the size of a grown human.
The researchers, from the University of Edinburgh, based their findings on the first-ever discovered fossilized tyrannosaur embryos — a jaw bone found in Canada and a claw unearthed in the U.S.
Lead study author Greg Funston told CNN that the discovery of fossilized dinosaur embryos is extremely rare, but hopes their findings will help other paleontologists better identify them.
Funston said they now know that tyrannosaurs were born with a full set of teeth and hunted for themselves.
“These were animals that were hatching and were probably fairly active relatively soon after they hatched,” Funston told CNN.
However, since most other T. Rex fossils are from older animals, there is still much to learn about how the mighty predators developed after hatching.
Funston said next steps were trying to determine how long tyrannosaurs gestated before hatching which will require new scans of the jaw fossils.
