HAVE WE BEEN READING REX WRONG?
With the strongest bite of any living or extinct terrestrial animal and an attitude to match, the T-Rex is known for being ferocious, a reputation perpetuated by the Jurassic Park franchise and the movies One Million Years BC, The Land that Time Forgot, and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?.
However, new research has cast doubt upon its bad boy reputation, with scientists at the University of East Virginia suggesting that the T-Rex’s bullying tendencies may not have simply been the result of it being the dinosaur equivalent of a complete knob.
Head researcher, Dr. Corey Sample explained the thinking behind their thinking:
“Following a scientific breakthrough and a quantum leap, we were able to extract DNA from the brain of a T-Rex fossil found in West Dakota. By placing the DNA into a centrifuge, we managed to separate its personality traits, which produced some very interesting results, namely that the T-Rex’s dominant characteristic wasn’t viciousness, cruelty, or anger, but insecurity.”
What a massive apex predator that could measure up to 40 feet from tail to teeth would have to feel insecure about is anybody’s guess, but Sample has a theory:
“The T-Rex had large and powerful hind limbs, but its forelimbs were short and, let’s face it, kind of funny looking. It’s possible that other dinosaurs made fun of its forelimbs by calling it names like stumpy, stubby, or other mean nicknames that were acceptable 60 million years ago (in fact, even as recently as the 1980s), but which are considered politically incorrect today. We know from our DNA/centrifuge research that Triceratopses were really sarcastic; might they have had something to do with it? Everyone knows that there’s usually an underlying reason why bullies bully - deep-seated personal insecurities, stress, trauma, sexual dysfunction -, in this instance could it be because the bully was being bullied?”
So, there you have it – did T-Rexes go bananas because they were cheesed off or simply because they were bad eggs? Food for thought and something to chew on.