Why did T-Rex have such teeny arms?

T-Rexes used their forelimbs to go Bolan. :stuck_out_tongue:

No.

Not in English, at least according to the editors at Merriam-Webster. “Tyrannosauruses” or “T. rexes.”

  • Bearded dragons [small lizards from australia], the female ‘waves’ one of her upper legs [arms i guess] to show submission to males! SO-

to add- - pythons and boa’s have vestigial hips/legs and, external “claws”, i have many times, watched males “stimulating,” scratching females they are trying to mate with, its sometimes hard to believe how far a range of motion these little claws move! Its generally though, but i could be wrong, that the males have larger spurs. So could T-rex “caress” his mates neck?

Why not? It’s now known that wings go back at least as far in the dino family tree as ornithomimids, which are only one or two branch up from tyrannosaurs.

If the arms of large tyrannosaurids bore display feathers of some kind, this could partially explain the paradoxical small size plus heavy musculature (perhaps employed in some kind of flapping display?).

The ukulele?
THE UKULELE? REALLY?!?

Everybody knows T-Rex played the Bassoon.

You’re both wrong! :smiley:

Couple of reasons:

  1. The post to which I gave my terse response asked “isn’t it more likely that they…actually evolved smaller WINGS?” That would require wings to already have been present among coelurosaurs, prior to Tyrannosauridae. Possible? Perhaps. But not “more likely”, given our current knowledge of these groups.

  2. Feathered forearms do not a wing make, any more than feathers alone make a bird. The time of feathers being a diagnostic character for birds is long gone. Similarly, the definition of “wing” ought to be further refined (note that even the cladogram in the linked Skeletal Drawings blog notes that actual wings don’t appear until about the Paraves clade; Ornithomimids actually had a pennibrachium). Thus, if tyrannosaurs were found to have had feathered forelimbs, they could be also said to have a pennebrachium (contingent on the actual arrangement of these hypothetical feathers), but I wouldn’t say they had actual wings.

I would rather face a T Rex than a mammal predator for the reason that IIRC T Rex had no meylin sheathing on their neurons and their brains were far slower than ours. It would be easy to hide from one.

You mean like we don’t have to worry about snakes and crocodiles and other reptiles, because they are so slow and stupid?

Or you could give me a cite that the T Rex had no meylin sheathing on its neurons.

Investigate the work of Nicolai Bernstein

That’s not a cite, which is annoying, but in a generous mood I went so far as look at the Wiki for Bernstein. Nothing on T. Rex, or myelin. You need to do better.

If it’s the same one who comes up first in Google, he died in 1966. And that means I can guarantee you that the sum total of his knowledge of myelin sheathing in T. Rex was exactly equal to that of madsircool.

First rule of T-Rex… Don’t talk about the T-Bone.

I think it’s all about utility. I.e: Bigger doesn’t necessarily mean better.
The reason T Rex arms were muscular were because the required them strong. The reason they were small were because (Speculative):

  1. The center of gravity would’ve shifted forward if they hands were big.
  2. They would’ve used their hands to claw and latch prey down rather than feed itself like most creatures do (I mean the nails were pretty big…)
  3. (The really embarrassing bit) (Fe)male T Rexs liked small hands… Like how peacocks with large and colourful plumage are mostly chosen over less attractive and smaller ones.

In retrospection: They need big a jaw to crunch bones and tear flesh… big legs to run fast and big tail to balance… (Nature gave it to them)
But since they were bipeds and the hands weren’t used to handle tools or do other energy demanding jobs… they probably became reduced over time… yet remaining strong enough to ensure that they could be used as a hunting devices for pinning, clawing or tearing…

This current thread might be relevant. :stuck_out_tongue:

Probably why they were so cranky. It’s hard to cuddle properly with such tiny arms.:frowning:

Did the T-Rex challenge it’s prey to a game of Scrabble or something? Who cares how smart it was. I’d rather face a predator that’s not as tall as a building.

So you are thinking of Rex as functioning like an adjective, modifying tyrannosaurus?

Well, OK, but if (again) we are doing Latin, adjectives need to agree in number (and case) with the nouns they modify - so still Reges. :wink: