The Real T. Rex Looked Nothing Like The Monster In “Jurassic Park” – Business Insider

If your image of the Tyrannosaurus rex is based on the ferocious creature in “Jurassic Park,” you’ve gotten quite a few things wrong about the king of the dinosaurs.

In recent years, paleontologists have been revising the scientific consensus about how the T. rex looked, sounded, and ate.

“Everyone’s preconceived ideas of what T. rex acted like and looked like are going to be heavily modified,” Mark Norell, a curator at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), told Business Insider. The museum just opened an exhibit devoted to the infamous dino, called “T. rex: The Ultimate Predator.”

The exhibit showcases the most up-to-date research on the prehistoric animal. And as it turns out, these predators started their lives as fuzzy, turkey-sized hatchlings. They also had excellent vision, with forward facing eyes like a hawk for superior depth perception. And T. rexes couldn’t run; instead, they walked at impressive speeds of up to 25 miles per hour.

But to be fair to Steven Spielberg, only seven or eight T. rex skeletons existed in the fossil record when his classic movie was produced in 1993. Since then, a dozen more skeletons have been discovered, and those bones have changed scientists’ understanding of these creatures.