Tyrannosaurus rex
Name means “Tyrant lizard king”
T. rex was one of the biggest meat-eaters ever to walk on land. It had a giant head, super strong jaws and tiny two-fingered arms.
Tyrannosaurus rex was a large tyrannosaurid theropod from the last two to three million years of the Cretaceous in western North America. Its forward-facing eyes, enormous olfactory bulbs and bone-crushing bite made it the apex predator of its ecosystem.
Tyrannosaurus BW.jpg — Nobu Tamura (http://spinops.blogspot.com) · CC BY 2.5
Pictures
Spin it in 3D
3D model description: a 3D model of Tyrannosaurus rex shaped from a scientific life reconstruction painting, with the painting's colours and skin texture wrapped around it. It is not a scan of a real fossil.
About this model
This model is shaped from a scientific life reconstruction by Nobu Tamura (http://spinops.blogspot.com): the painting's outline gives the 3D body and the painting itself is its skin. It is sized to the real animal's length (about 12.5 m), so in AR it appears life-size!
It looks best from the side, like the painting it comes from. It is not a fossil scan — museums such as the Smithsonian 3D collection share real fossil scans you can explore.
What might it sound like?
Transcript: Deep, closed-mouth rumbling boom, about 3 seconds long
🤔 Nobody knows exactly how dinosaurs sounded
Crocodiles and birds, T. rex's closest living relatives, both make low closed-mouth sounds. Scientists think T. rex may have boomed or rumbled with its mouth shut rather than roaring like in films.
Voice boxes and soft tissue almost never fossilise, so sound reconstructions use clues: body size (bigger animals make lower sounds), the calls of living relatives (crocodiles boom with closed mouths; birds coo and hiss), and hollow structures such as hadrosaur crests that could have worked like a trumpet.
Sound: synthesised by DinoVerse from these scientific ideas (CC0). It is a creative guess, not a recording.
Food and habits
Carnivore
Meat-eater
How it ate
Grabbed prey with a huge mouth of thick, banana-sized serrated teeth and crushed through bone with one of the strongest bites of any land animal.
🔍 How do we know?
- tooth shape
- coprolites with bone fragments
- bite marks on Triceratops and Edmontosaurus bones
Tyrannosaurus rex
…and was eaten by
👑 Probably nothing, once fully grown — a top predator or too big to tackle!
Arrows show energy moving up the food chain: from food to eater.
Watch it walk
Quick facts
| 📏 Length | 12–13 m (39–43 ft) |
|---|---|
| ↕️ Height | 3.6–4 m (12–13 ft) |
| ⚖️ Weight | 5,000–9,000 kg (11,020–19,840 lb) |
| ⏳ When it lived | 68–66 million years ago (Late Cretaceous) |
| 📍 Fossils found | Hell Creek Formation, Montana, USA; South Dakota, USA; Alberta, Canada |
| 🔎 Discovered | 1902 by Barnum Brown |
| 🧬 Group | Theropods — Saurischia › Theropoda |
Where scientists disagree, we show a range. Sizes are for adults.
How big was it?
Where and when
- 📍 Hell Creek Formation, Montana, USA (North America)
- 📍 South Dakota, USA (North America)
- 📍 Alberta, Canada (North America)
Lived 68–66 million years ago
That's about 67 million years before you were born! Humans have only existed for about 0.3 million years.
See it on the big timeline →Did you know?
- 1A T. rex tooth could be as long as a banana!
- 2Its arms were short, but each one could still lift about as much as a grown-up person.
- 3T. rex could smell food from far away, because the smell part of its brain was huge.
- 4Baby T. rex may have been covered in fluffy feathers.
- Bite-force estimates for adult T. rex range from roughly 35,000 to 57,000 newtons at the back teeth, enough to puncture and crush bone.
- Growth-ring studies of its bones suggest T. rex grew fastest as a teenager, adding hundreds of kilograms per year.
- Fossilised skin patches from the neck, hips and tail show small scales, so adults were probably mostly scaly even though relatives like Yutyrannus had feathers.
- Scientists still debate whether T. rex was mainly a hunter or a scavenger; most now think it did both, like modern lions and hyenas.
Myth vs fact
❌ MythT. rex could only see you if you moved.
✅ FactIts forward-facing eyes gave it excellent depth perception — likely better than a hawk's.
❌ MythT. rex stood upright with its tail dragging on the ground.
✅ FactFootprints and skeletons show it held its body level, with the tail held up to balance its heavy head.
Mini quiz
1. What does 'Tyrannosaurus rex' mean?
2. When did T. rex live?
3. How many fingers did each T. rex hand have?
Related animals
Velociraptor
TheropodLate CretaceousCarnivore
Triceratops
CeratopsianLate CretaceousHerbivore
Edmontosaurus
OrnithopodLate CretaceousHerbivore
Sources
Media on this page
- Tyrannosaurus BW.jpg — Nobu Tamura (http://spinops.blogspot.com) · CC BY 2.5
- Fern in forest by I. Levitan (1895, N. Novgorod).jpg — Isaac Levitan · Public domain
- Tyrannosaurus rex 3D model, shaped from the life reconstruction "Tyrannosaurus BW.jpg" — Nobu Tamura (http://spinops.blogspot.com) (artwork); 3D shaping by DinoVerse · CC BY 2.5
- Tyrannosaurus rex reconstructed call (synthesised) — DinoVerse (synthesised) · CC0 1.0
- Tyrannosaurus Rex Holotype.jpg — ScottRobertAnselmo · CC BY-SA 3.0
- Juvenile Tyrannosaurus skull LACM.jpg — Jonathan Chen · CC BY-SA 4.0
- Nanotyrannus lancensis skull.jpg — James St. John · CC BY 2.0