T. rex, a baby mama?
Yep, that’s right. When it came to sex, T. rex and his pals were quite precocious.
New evidence suggests that dinosaurs had pregnancies as early as age 8. But they had good reason to be frisky. They matured fast and died young, living from 25 to 30 years.
University of California-Berkeley researchers made the determination after analyzing the medullary bone – the same tissue that allows birds to develop eggshells – in two new dinosaur specimens, the meat-eater allosaurus and the plant-eater tenontosaurus. The tyrannosaurus rex also had the medullary bone, which had been documented in previous studies, said Sarah Werning, a graduate student at UC-Berkeley.
Werner said she and her peer were able to determine the ages of the dinosaurs by counting the rings in their bones.
“Not only were they not fully grown, but they were going through a fast growth spurt,” said Werner, who did the study with Andrew Lee, a post-doctoral student at Ohio University, who conducted the work as a graduate student at UC-Berkeley.
In that way, Werner said, these dinosaurs were not much different from adolescent humans, who are not fully grown but are still capable of reproducing.
“If the dinosaurs waited until they stopped growing, they would only have about five or 10 years of reproductive life,” she said.
Contact Sandra Gonzales at sgonzales@mercurynews.com or (408) 920-5778.
