Could T Rex skeletons have their arms put on backwards?

[lionking]

This is one of the funniest threads for quite some time. Expect some desperate, last minute edits.

 

[truethat]

Dinwar has not been in this thread.

Seriously, admit you are wrong. It's easier than denying the undeniable.

ETA Neat edit. It isn't fooling anyone.,admit you are wrong.

Stop derailing the thread yet again. I'm not wrong. I understood that Dinwar123 is different and said so. And I'm not seeing why this is such a huge deal. Maybe some people should get a life.

 

[lionking]

Stop derailing the thread yet again. I'm not wrong. I understood that Dinwar123 is different and said so. And I'm not seeing why this is such a huge deal. Maybe some people should get a life.

Christ, Darwin123. For someone who berates people for reading comprehension, this is classic.

 

[AdMan]

This thread really is too funny, starting with the plucked chicken.

 

[truethat]

So here comes my dumb question of the night, or maybe observation or whatever (in multiple form sort of).

We look at a T Rex and it seems silly because its arms are so small, but imagine a T rex with no arms at all, like a flightless bird. It seems likely that with no arms at all, a T Rex could still function pretty well, run around, eat off the ground, kill, grab carrion and whatnot. A crow can. But imagine that the T Rex wanted to, say, tear a creature apart, or otherwise deal with it before eating it. Maybe a taste for livers or a distaste for tails. Or maybe just a taste for little mammals that are hard to deal with under a huge foot. It's way too big and clumsy to do much with its enormous jaws and huge feet, and if its front arms were proportional, they'd be clumsy too. If a T. Rex had proportionally enormous hands, could it even manage to hold on to a squirrel? Or an egg? So why can't we imagine that the T. Rex could have a use for smaller hands with which to do stuff? If it is capable of getting up and down, balancing, and whatnot, with no arms at all, it does not need arms that provide support. It need not even use them to put things in its mouth. It could bend down, tear its prey apart, and then lay it back down and eat it hands' free. Or perhaps it had some bizarre nesting or mating habit that required it to be able to manipulate things with more delicacy than its huge size allowed. The arms of a T Rex are very big in any context but proportion with the rest of the animal, the rest of which is huge and not seemingly well designed to deal with much that is not commensurately huge.

Maybe T Rex needed small arms because big arms would not work well.

My thoughts exactly - so I give you.

Phorusrhacids, colloquially known as terror birds, are an extinct clade of large carnivorous flightless birds that were the largest species of apex predators in South America during the Cenozoic, 62–1.8 million years (Ma) ago.

How about poison! That's my secret fantasy T rex. But there doesn't seem to be anything that indicates it. But I wondered if maybe instead of investing all that energy in the attack the T rex holds the animal with its mouth and slaps on the talons and injects poison.

This thread really is too funny, starting with the plucked chicken.

Hey I saw Mysterious Island when I was a kid.....it could happen!

 

[lionking]

This thread really is too funny, starting with the plucked chicken.

Indeed.

 

[lionking]

While funny, this is also serious and on topic. Truethat has been posting about someone who hasn't been contributing to this thread, Dinwar123. Despite it being pointed out several times that such a member does not exist, truethat continues to insist that he or she does, and berates people who point this gross error out. It is truethat who is derailing this thread and she should apologise.

 

[Bram Kaandorp]

While funny, this is also serious and on topic. Truethat has been posting about someone who hasn't been contributing to this thread, Dinwar123. Despite it being pointed out several times that such a member does not exist, truethat continues to insist that he or she does, and berates people who point this gross error out. It is truethat who is derailing this thread and she should apologise.

This is made worse by the fact that the name Darwin is in the name of the actual person being mistaken for Dinwar, in a thread about an evolutionary question.

 

[lionking]

This is made worse by the fact that the name Darwin is in the name of the actual person being mistaken for Dinwar, in a thread about an evolutionary question.

Reading comprehension. It's a great thing.

 

[truethat]

This is made worse by the fact that the name Darwin is in the name of the actual person being mistaken for Dinwar, in a thread about an evolutionary question.

It seems to me you might be hung up on Dinwar123 being some sort of YEC?

I don't care about that at all. There's no reason to worry about the curiosity of someone who denies evolution. (I do not know that Dinwar123 does btw) This attempt to attack people for engaging with a poster that others don't like has got to be something of Meta-bullying.

This thread is meant to be a ligthhearted discussion and a philosophical one at best since it is very unlikely that we will ever know what a T rex actually looked like.

I received the answer to my actual science question from Delvo earlier in the thread.

Is there a reason that people want to derail a casual conversation about T rexes arms? I wasn't aware that I started a discussion about a topic of such importance.

Maybe I should have framed the naked chicken in the first page.

 

[lionking]

It seems to me you might be hung up on Dinwar123 being some sort of YEC?

I don't care about that at all. There's no reason to worry about the curiosity of someone who denies evolution. (I do not know that Dinwar123 does btw) This attempt to attack people for engaging with a poster that others don't like has got to be something of Meta-bullying.

This thread is meant to be a ligthhearted discussion and a philosophical one at best since it is very unlikely that we will ever know what a T rex actually looked like.

I received the answer to my actual science question from Delvo earlier in the thread.

Is there a reason that people want to derail a casual conversation about T rexes arms? I wasn't aware that I started a discussion about a topic of such importance.

Maybe I should have framed the naked chicken in the first page.

Oh for goodness sake. Big caps follow.

DINWAR123 DOES NOT EXIST

 

[lionking]

Truethat?

 

[Damien Evans]

Oh shoot good to know. I mean that the arms should be situated like chicken wings, (upside down? backwards???) That's why I posted the pictures of both.

In other words did we just automatically assume they were armlike appendages because we visualized them as dragons or monsters, when in fact they are more like giant birds.

Why should they? Human arms aren't like Rabbit arms and we're much closer related than Tyrannosaurs and Chickens. Tyrannosaurs evolutionary branch diverged from Chickens 160 million years ago, give or take 15 million years. Primates and Glires (Rodents, Rabbits and Pikas) split about 75 million years ago.

 

[truethat]

Why should they? Human arms aren't like Rabbit arms and we're much closer related than Tyrannosaurs and Chickens. Tyrannosaurs evolutionary branch diverged from Chickens 160 million years ago, give or take 15 million years. Primates and Glires (Rodents, Rabbits and Pikas) split about 75 million years ago.

Just out of curiosity. It's always been interesting to me.

 

[truethat]

Oh for goodness sake. Big caps follow.

DINWAR123 DOES NOT EXIST

Oh!!!! LOL Now I see. Got it.

Apologies to Darwin123. I still don't get what the bid deal is. He's not said anything to me about it so why does it bother you so much? Like I said, get a life.

 

[Damien Evans]

Yeah but think about it, exactly as you say, they didn't just "appear" Trex is a height of evolutionary processes, not a beginning stage. If these were vesitigial bones, they could have been from something we don't know because we've never found fossils for them.

So to just dismiss questions is wrong. We should ask questions and wonder. That's what SCIENCE is for.

No such thing. Evolution is not a a goal oriented process, at least not in that way. T. rex was no more a height of evolutionary processes than we are, merely a species of animal that evolved and then went extinct, much like all other species have or will, presumably us included.

 

[lionking]

Oh!!!! LOL Now I see. Got it.

Apologies to Darwin123. I still don't get what the bid deal is. He's not said anything to me about it so why does it bother you so much? Like I said, get a life.

What's wrong is that you were referring to someone who doesn't exist while attacking those who pointed it out. You need to apologise to more people than Darwin123. And to stop berating people for not reading threads properly.

Your off topic attacks against an imaginary member bothers me. And I have a life.

 

[truethat]

I did not read the name properly. (I know I'm probably the first person in the history of the internet to have done that) and I apologize for that.

But a simple comment could be "Truthat, you're confusing Dinwar with Darwin123, it's a different name"

Not repeated attempts to derail the thread will bullying and pile ons. It's transparent to everyone who can read the thread that jumping from thread to thread to thread trying to get attention and derail, is going on.

So once again apologies to Darwin123 and others that I misread the name. I was wrong.

Now can we get back on topic?

 

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Go to the Field Museum, Chicago, Illinois, USA. Ask for Sue.

 

[truethat]

Here's an interesting point that the Trexes would repeatedly break their arms. So although they may have been able to hold a lot of weight in their arms, it doesn't seem that they were being used for physical activity.

It is now clear that T. rex's hands could not reach its mouth. The elbow could not be extended much beyond a 90-degree angle. The arms were very strong (perhaps capable of curling nearly 400 pounds) but had a very limited range of motion, both side-to-side and up-and-down. The wrists were considerably weaker and do not seem suited for supporting large mechanical loads. Like those of their albertosaur "cousins," the small T. rex arms were often broken during life. This fact suggests that they were poorly suited for whatever the dinosaurs were trying to use them for and, more importantly, that these animals could go without using their arms for periods of up to a month.


Collectively, these findings seem to fly in the face of just one of the aforementioned theories--Newman's push-up theory. If this is the case, then how then did T. rex get up? I think we can look to the birds (avian dinosaurs) for the answer as they can stand up without the aid of arms. It is simply a matter of getting one's limbs below the center of gravity before extending them. I am not aware of any studies suggesting tyrannosaurs could not do this. Furthermore, tyrannosaurs would have had the additional aid of their tails. From skeletal evidence and albertosaur trackways (in which the tails did not drag), it is clear tyrannosaur tails acted as counter-balances--10,000-pound walking, teeter-totters. The tail would have helped to keep the center of balance back on the body as the hindlimbs were moved into position underneath.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/if-t-rex-fell-how-did-it/