Feeding a Rex: Dead or Alive

A scavenging T. rex may diminish the real and cultural ferocity of this extinct dinosaur but that was a reasonable assumption in recent years. Would a T. rex pass up a free meal; or would he prefer the chase? A new study led by Chris Carbone, Intra-guild competition and its implication for one of the biggest terrestrial predators, Tyrannosaurus rex (also see http://www.livescience.com/animals/t-rex-hunted-prey-110125.html ) suggest that the food supply favors a hunting rex, restoring the king to its esteemed position, rather than the dumpster-diving reptile. Based on an estimate of body-size of herbivorous dinosaurs in the Late Cretaceous, nearly half were in the small kg range where small theropod dinosaurs would be in direct competition with T. rex. Avoiding the challenges of competition, "T. rex and other extremely large carnivorous dinosaurs...would have primarily hunted large vertebrate prey, similar to many large mammalian carnivores in modern-day ecosystems."