Which came 1st, the T-rex or the egg?

SO, did the T-rex taste like chicken, heh

If you’ve read or watched “Jurassic Park,” then you’ve heard the hypothesis that birds evolved from dinosaurs. But researchers now have unearthed new evidence of the evolutionary link between dinosaurs and birds.

Here’s an excerpt from one of the stories that came out about the Tyrannosaurus rex fossil:

When the researchers compared those amino acid sequences to those of similar proteins in several contemporary animals, they found that the T-rex sequence had similarities to those of chickens, and to a lesser extent frogs and newts.

That finding bolsters a recent and controversial proposal that birds and dinosaurs are evolutionarily related, and change that hypothesis to a theory, the researchers said.

“Most people believe that birds evolved from dinosaurs, but that’s all based on the architecture of the bones,” said John Asara, who is director of mass spectrometry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical School.

“This allows you to get the chance to say ‘Wait, they really are related because their sequences are related.’ We didn’t get enough sequences to definitively say that, but what sequences we got support that idea.”

Meanwhile, if, like me, you’ve wondered how the heck T-rex could have gotten up again if it fell down, considering how itty-bitty its arms were, an expert shares the answer in Scientific American.

Here’s an excerpt:

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.

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