A year ago
A new study into the number of T-Rexes there were on Earth before the dinosaurs got wiped out has concluded that there were probably about 1.7 billion of them running around in total.
Anyone who knows about dinosaurs will be aware of the Tyrannosaurus Rex, otherwise known as the T-Rex, as it's pretty much the poster child for dinosaurs being a cool thing to learn about.
The huge carnivorous dinosaurs with big chompy teeth (or maybe not that big), amusingly small arms and a name meaning 'tyrant dinosaur king' was always going to be cool, even before Jurassic Park came along.
Speaking of which, unless we have a Jurassic Park-type situation (and that movie outlined pretty well why we really shouldn't do that), the T-Rexes have been gone for good for over 60 million years after they got wiped out by an asteroid along with about 75 percent of other life on Earth.
Still, a new study into the fascinating dinos has shed some light on how many of them might have been alive at the height of their dominance.
A study conducted by the University of Mainz built on previous estimates which factored in how large the average T-Rex was, how closely they appeared to live to one another, their average lifespan, how many eggs they laid and many other factors.
It found that each generation of T-Rexes numbered about 20,000, and having been around for 2.5 million years in total, there would have been about 125,000 generations to get through.
According to Live Science, evolutionary ecologist, Eva Griebeler, thought the original study had overestimated the survival rate of the T-Rex and how many eggs they laid.
Before now, it had been thought that there had been around 2.5 billion T-Rexes in total which had set foot upon planet Earth, but the new revised figure is closer to 1.7 billion.
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