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April 25, 2008
Tyrannosaurus rex not as "nosey" as once thought
Tyrrell scientist studies dinosaur's sense of smell
Drumheller... A team of Alberta and Maryland scientists discovered that Tyrannosaurus rex did not have as keen a sense of smell as previously thought, prompting further research into this dinosaur’s behaviour.
In a paper recently published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, Dr. François Therrien of the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Alberta; Dr. Darla Zelenitsky of Alberta’s University of Calgary; and palaeoartist Farheen Ali and Dr. David Weishampel from the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland investigated various aspects of the T. rex skull to gain insight into the sense of smell of this large meat-eater.
This research may change how palaeontologists reconstruct the lifestyle of T. rex because the sense of smell plays an important role in locating food. Previously, the huge organs of smell in T. rex have been used as an argument to support the idea that the animal was a scavenger because a keen sense of smell would have helped locate rotting carcasses. Now that T. rex is shown to have had much smaller organs of smell, this means it wasn’t as good a “sniffer” as previously thought. Research is currently underway to see how its sense of smell compared to that of other meat-eating dinosaurs.
Operated by the Alberta government, the Royal Tyrrell Museum is located six kilometres northwest of Drumheller and is the only Canadian institution devoted exclusively to the science of palaeontology. For more information, visit
Note to Editors: A copy of the article published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology is available upon request.
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