You know what they say that you can’t have your cake and eat it too. It seems to have been available for some dinosaurs as well. Tyrannosaurus rex was a killing machine, one of the most ferocious predators that our planet ever had. Its powerful jaws and fangs, as well as its enormous size of roughly 40 feet in length, allowed the beast to be very feared by other dinosaurs. But the arms of Tyrannosaurus rex didn’t seem to be too helpful when it came to searching for prey, but don’t be so sure!
Of course, you might be tempted to believe that it was nothing else but an error of nature to give small arms to a dinosaur so dangerous as T. rex. Or perhaps God wanted to do an experiment. But according to CNET, new findings reveal that there might be a strong reason behind short upper limbs for ferocious dinosaurs after all, as scientists have uncovered the remnants of Meraxes gigas, a dinosaur that’s similar to T. rex. Meraxes is also the kind of dinosaur that seems to hate sleeping with a teddy bear more than anything in the world. Jokes aside, for now! What we mean by that is that the creature was also a huge beast with a big appetite for chowing down on meat. However, it also had short arms.
Small dinosaur arms might have granted a survival advantage
The research team now believes, along with the new discovery, that small arms somehow might have helped dinosaurs survive, although scientists are not sure at this point how exactly that would work. Even so, the arms featured strong muscles for their small sizes.
Juan Canale, who’s project lead at Ernesto Bachmann Paleontological Museum in Argentina, explained as CNET quotes:
I’m convinced that those proportionally tiny arms had some sort of function,
The skeleton shows large muscle insertions and fully developed pectoral girdles, so the [arms] had strong muscles. This means that the arms did not shrink because they were useless to the dinosaurs.
The new research was published in Current Biology.
