mentions dinosaurs, I believe many friends will think of Tyrannosaurus rex . After all, in many sci-fi works related to dinosaurs, this top predator from Cretaceous is the protagonist of the protagonist.
According to reports, according to a study some time ago, scientists found that although Tyrannosaurus rex only evolved on the earth for about 3.5 million years, the number of Tyrannosaurus rex may exceed 1 billion, which is very The huge number also means that perhaps in North America, and other places where Tyrannosaurus Rex fossils have not yet been found, this behemoth once "bloomed everywhere".
A billion tyrannosaurs once ruled the earth?
In terms of quantity, this is really a very spectacular number. However, if it is placed in the entire dinosaur team, it is not worth mentioning. You must know that dinosaurs are three stacks from more than 200 million years ago. The epoch has already appeared, and dinosaur fossils are all over the world, which means that in fact, the number of dinosaurs that once lived on the earth may be more than the number of humans that once lived on the earth.
Then, since the birth of human beings, or to be more precise, since the birth of , the direct ancestor of modern humans, Homo sapiens , how many human beings have lived on the earth? The answer is more than 100 billion people, and since modern humans are still evolving on earth, this number itself is also increasing year by year.
Of course, due to the natural law of "birth, old age, sickness and death", in fact, there are not so many human beings alive. Naturally, although there were 1 billion Tyrannosaurus rex that ruled the earth, they all came from different periods, not all at once. living on earth.
And through fossil research, scientists have found that the lifespan of Tyrannosaurus Rex is relatively "short-lived" compared to other dinosaurs. The longest known Tyrannosaurus Rex is only 28 years old.
This means that the life cycle of Tyrannosaurus Rex is very short, and their "regeneration" speed is also very fast. Naturally, these 1 billion Tyrannosaurus Rex can also appear from generation to generation in just 3.5 million years. .
, once the most powerful carnivorous dinosaur on the earth, if not for the sudden arrival of the fifth mass extinction , the Tyrannosaurus rex may continue to live on the earth for a long time, then, there is a view that the Tyrannosaurus rex In fact, it did not become extinct, but evolved into a species that we are very familiar with - chicken, is this true?
T-Rex is the ancestor of chicken?
Although chickens are poultry, chickens are species that humans domesticated from pheasants . At the same time, if we go back further, pheasants belong to a type of birds , and modern scientific research believes that the ancestors of birds should be It's some kind of small theropod .
For example, in the western region of Liaoning, my country, the Chinese bird dragon and Confucius bird were found. The former is a small feathered theropod dinosaur that lived in trees; the latter is a kind of about 140 million people. The primitive bird around 2000 can fly in the sky, which makes researchers believe that there is a genetic evolutionary relationship between the two.
Naturally, if dinosaurs are really the ancestors of birds, then it is not surprising to say that dinosaurs are the ancestors of chickens, but if the Tyrannosaurus rex, the once king of the dinosaur world, has evolved into a human meal , this point, it is a bit unbelievable, is it really possible? This view of
first started in 2007, when an American scientist discovered through research that the molecular code of the protein in dinosaurs was actually the same as that of chickens.
At the same time, as early as the 1950s, the statement that the domestic chicken originated from the Indian pheasant mentioned in " Origin of Species " by Darwin was overturned, which also led the scientist to propose A bold conjecture: Chickens may have originated from Tyrannosaurus Rex.
Of course, this is not entirely correct, because the protein molecular coding will fit, not because chicken originated from Tyrannosaurus rex, but because Tyrannosaurus rex is a kind of theropod dinosaur, and we mentioned above However, modern scientific research believes that primitive birds originated from some small theropod dinosaurs.
Naturally, judging from the origin of theropod dinosaurs, primitive birds and Tyrannosaurus rex are indeed homologous, at least 100 million years ago, they have not parted ways, so there are a lot of similarities , there is no problem.
Judging from the current research on Tyrannosaurus rex, the number of Tyrannosaurus rex fossils discovered by humans is only about 1/80 million of the total number of Tyrannosaurs, which also means that there are still many deficiencies in our understanding of Tyrannosaurus Rex. In the future, with new fossils unearthed, it will also better sort out the evolutionary history of Tyrannosaurus Rex for us, and find out the mystery of their origin and extinction. Let’s wait and see!
