New study says 1.7 billion T-Rexes roamed the earth before going extinct
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A new study into the number of T-Rexes there were on Earth before the dinosaurs got wiped out has concluded that there were probably about 1.7 billion of them running around in total.
Anyone who knows about dinosaurs will be aware of the Tyrannosaurus Rex, otherwise known as the T-Rex, as it's pretty much the poster child for dinosaurs being a cool thing to learn about.
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The huge carnivorous dinosaurs with big chompy teeth (or maybe not that big), amusingly small arms and a name meaning 'tyrant dinosaur king' was always going to be cool, even before Jurassic Park came along.
Speaking of which, unless we have a Jurassic Park-type situation (and that movie outlined pretty well why we really shouldn't do that), the T-Rexes have been gone for good for over 60 million years after they got wiped out by an asteroid along with about 75 percent of other life on Earth.
Still, a new study into the fascinating dinos has shed some light on how many of them might have been alive at the height of their dominance.
A study conducted by the University of Mainz built on previous estimates which factored in how large the average T-Rex was, how closely they appeared to live to one another, their average lifespan, how many eggs they laid and many other factors.
It found that each generation of T-Rexes numbered about 20,000, and having been around for 2.5 million years in total, there would have been about 125,000 generations to get through.
According to Live Science, evolutionary ecologist, Eva Griebeler, thought the original study had overestimated the survival rate of the T-Rex and how many eggs they laid.
Before now, it had been thought that there had been around 2.5 billion T-Rexes in total which had set foot upon planet Earth, but the new revised figure is closer to 1.7 billion.
Then again, 1.7 billion T-Rexes still sounds like quite a lot of the mighty dinosaurs stomping and chomping their way around the world over more than two million years before the asteroid came down and wiped them out.
We say wiped them out, they weren't all standing in the same spot and got squished, it took a while after the asteroid hit for it to actually lead to the dinosaurs going extinct.
The asteroid was estimated to be between 10 and 15 kilometres wide, but when it struck the planet, it created a giant crater about 150 kilometres in diameter.
With huge amounts of debris thrown into the air and the massive tidal waves caused by the impact, anything unlucky enough to be in that area definitely had a bad day.
The asteroid sent soot all over the world, not completely blocking out the sun but significantly reducing the amount of light that made it to the surface of our planet.
It had a devastating impact on plant life, which in turn led to starvation and death of herbivore dinosaurs and cut off the food supply for carnivorous ones, like the T-Rex, who eventually starved.
