How fast could t rex run

Cosmos is published by The Royal Institution of Australia, a charity dedicated to connecting people with the world of science. Financial contributions, however big or small, help us provide access to trusted science information at a time when the world needs it most. Please support us by making a donation or purchasing a subscription today. Share Tweet. Reconstruction of Trix the T.

Credit: Pasha van Bijlert. More on:. Deborah Devis Deborah Devis is a science journalist at Cosmos. In this lesson, students learn about sources of high-energy radiation and calculate student exposure to ionizing radiation over the past year. Those effects are meant to be entertaining, but not necessarily scientifically accurate. Was T. I'm Bob Hirshon and this is Science Update. It seemed to run at least as fast as its human co-star could drive.

But a new study suggests that the real-life T. Hutchinson: What we did was build a really simple two-dimensional model of the legs and the body of a bipedal, or two-legged, animal running at a given speed and kind of constrain to a possible range of values for a Tyrannosaurus. Hutchinson: If you go back and study the movie frame by frame, you can get an estimate of velocity. And actually the T. He says the animators tried to show T. So they slowed the dinosaur down and used quick edits to make the scene fast-paced and exciting.

Those estimates placed a T. For the new investigation, rather than focusing on T. It does this through two large tail muscles — the caudofemoral muscles — that pull the legs backwards during each step. In the bipedal two-legged T. When the rhythm of a swinging tail achieves resonance — "the biggest movement response with the least amount of effort" — that rhythm is known as the tail's "natural frequency," van Bijlert said. The natural frequency in a T. Related: In images: A new look at T.

Standing in as the researchers' model T. The study authors scanned and modeled Trix's tail bones, referencing marks on the well-preserved vertebrae that showed where ligaments attached. From this digital bone and ligament reconstruction, they created a biomechanical model of the tail. To find that, the scientists took the step length of a tyrannosaur that was slightly smaller than Trix, scaling it up to Trix's size.

They determined that Trix's step length would be 6.