Trex is always being mystery to scientist. Recently, scientist found some interesting fact about this creature.
Scientists at the University of Calgary and the Royal Tyrrell Museum are providing new insight into the sense of smell of carnivorous dinosaurs and primitive birds in a research paper published in the British journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
The study, by U of C paleontologist Darla Zelenitsky and Royal Tyrrell Museum curator of dinosaur palaeoecology François Therrien, is the first time that the sense of smell has been evaluated in prehistoric meat-eating dinosaurs. They found that Tyrannosaurus rex had the best nose of all meat-eating dinosaurs, and their results tone down the reputation of T. rex as a scavenger.
The researchers looked at the importance of the sense of smell among various meat-eating dinosaurs, also called theropods, based on the size of their olfactory bulbs, the part of the brain associated with the sense of smell. Although the brains of dinosaurs are not preserved, the impressions they left on skull bones or the space they occupied in the skull reveals the size and shape of the different parts of the brain. Zelenitsky and Therrien CT-scanned and measured the skulls of a wide variety of theropod dinosaurs, including raptors and ostrich-like dinosaurs, as well as the primitive bird Archaeopteryx.
"T. rex has previously been accused of being a scavenger due to its keen sniffer, although its nose may point to alternative lifestyles based on what we see in living animals" says Zelenitsky, the lead investigator on the study. "Large olfactory bulbs are found in living birds and mammals that rely heavily on smell to find meat, in animals that are active at night, and in those animals that patrol large areas. Although the king of carnivorous dinosaurs wouldn't have passed on scavenging a free dead meal, it may have used its sense of smell to strike at night or to navigate through large territories to find its next victim."
In addition to providing clues about the biology and behavior of the ancient predators, the study also reveals some surprising information about the sense of smell in the ancestors of modern birds.
Therrien and Zelenitsky found that the extinct bird Archaeopteryx, known to have evolved from small meat-eating dinosaurs, had an olfactory bulb size comparable to most theropod dinosaurs. Although sight is very good in most birds today, their sense of smell is usually poor, a pattern that does not hold true in the ancestry of living birds.
"Our results tell us that the sense of smell in early birds was not inferior to that of meat-eating dinosaurs," says Therrien. "Although it had been previously suggested that smell had become less important than eye sight in the ancestors of birds, we have shown that this wasn't so. The primitive bird Archaeopteryx had a sense of smell comparable to meat-eating dinosaurs, while at the same time it had very good eye sight. The sense of smell must have become less important at some point during the evolution of those birds more advanced than Archaeopteryx."
Source: University of Calgary
Refreshment : 100 Most Inspirational Quotes
Contrary to the claims of the paleontologist Hans Thewissen, who assumes a major role in evolutionist propaganda on the subject of the origin of marine mammals, and is one of National Geographic's most important sources of information, we are dealing not with an evolutionary process backed up by empirical evidence, but by evidence coerced to fit a presupposed evolutionary family tree, despite the many contradictions between the two.
What emerges, if the evidence is looked at more objectively, is that different living groups emerged independently of each other in the past. This is compelling empirical evidence for accepting that God created all of these creatures.
Loud evolutionist propaganda about marine mammals, however, resembles the 'horse series' that was once put forward in the same way, but which evolutionists then admitted was invalid. A number of extinct mammals that lived at different times were lined up behind one another, and the evolutionists of the time tried to impose this as 'firm evidence.' Yet the truth emerged over time, and it was realized that these animals could not be each others' ancestors, that they had emerged in different periods, and that they were actually independent extinct species. Dr. Niles Eldredge, a curator at the American Museum in New York, , where "evolution of the horse" diagrams were on public display at that time on the ground floor of the museum, said the following about the exhibition:
"There have been an awful lot of stories, some more imaginative than others, about what the nature of that history [of life] really is. The most famous example, still on exhibit downstairs, is the exhibit on horse evolution prepared perhaps fifty years ago. That has been presented as the literal truth in textbook after textbook. Now I think that is lamentable, particularly when the people who propose those kinds of stories may themselves be aware of the speculative nature of some of that stuff." (15)
The evolution of whales fairy story, so fiercely defended by National Geographic, is another of these fantasies of natural history. Like its predecessors, it too will soon find itself in the waste bin of science.
(1) Open Letter to National Geographic by Storrs L. Olson, Curator of Birds, National Museum of Natural History Smithsonian Institution
(2) National Geographic, "Evolution of Whales", November 2001, p. 68
(3) Robert L. Carroll, Patterns and Process of Vertebrate Evolution, Cambridge University Press, 1998, p.329
(4) Ashby L. Camp, "The Overselling of Whale Evolution", Creation Matters, a newsletter published by the Creation Research Society, May/June 1998
(5) Robert L. Carroll, Patterns and Process of Vertebrate Evolution, Cambridge University Press, 1998, p.333
(6) National Geographic, "Evolution of Whales", November 2001, p. 73
(7) Robert L. Carroll, Patterns and Processes of Vertebrate Evolution, Cambridge University Press, 1998, 329
(8) G. A. Mchedlidze, General Features of the Paleobiological Evolution of Cetacea, trans. from Russian (Rotterdam: A. A. Balkema, 1986), 91.
(9) Ashby L. Camp, "The Overselling of Whale Evolution", Creation Matters, a newsletter published by the Creation Research Society, May/June 1998
(10) National Geographic, "Evolution of Whales", November 2001, p. 69
(11) Pierre-P Grassé, Evolution of Living Organisms, New York: Academic Press, 1977, p. 103
(12) Henry Gee, In Search Of Deep Time: Beyond The Fossil Record To A New Hýstory Of Life, The Free Press, A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1999, p. 103
(13) B.J. Stahl, Vertebrate History: Problems in Evolution, Dover Publications, Inc., 1985, p. 489.
(14) Michel C. Milinkovitch, "Molecular phylogeny of cetaceans prompts revision of morphological transformations," Trends in Ecology and Evolution 10 (August 1995): 328-334.
(15) Niles Eldgridge, quoted in Darwin's Enigma by Luther D. Sunderland (Santee, CA, Master Books, 1988), page 78.)