Biggest T. rex found, according to reports in ScienceDaily 22 March 2019 and National Geographic 26 March 2019 and The Anatomical Record, 21 March 2019; doi: 10.1002/ar.24118.
Palaeontologists at the University of Alberta have found the largest Tyrannosaurus rex known. The 65% complete skeleton includes the skull and hips along with some ribs, leg and tail bones. Using calculations based on measurements of the dinosaur’s hips, legs and shoulders, they estimate it would have weighed around 8,800kg and was 13 metres long, making it the largest T. rex ever found. After examining growth patterns in its bones the researchers claim it was its early 30s when it died.
Scott Persons of University of Alberta commented: “By Tyrannosaurus standards, it had an unusually long life. And it was a violent one. Riddled across the skeleton are pathologies – spots where scarred bone records large injuries.” The bones show signs of broken ribs, a jaw infection and damage to the spine. The scientists suggest the spinal damage was the result of a bite from another tyrannosaur.
National Geographic, ScienceDaily
Editorial Comment: This is not the first report of disease in a T. rex fossil. See our report Trichomonosis Killed T. rex here.
The signs of a tough, violent life in dinosaur fossils are a challenge to all those theistic evolutionists and old earthers who claim to believe the Bible yet want to be believe dinosaurs (and other creatures) lived, struggled, fought and died for millions of years while God made all the land animals to be good, and then declared the whole creation was ‘very good’. Disease, trauma and fighting are not good.
The injuries on this T. rex are a reminder of the violence Genesis records in the time after the Fall of Man, but prior to Noah’s flood when the earth was filled with violence and corruption. The Biblical account reports that when God saw this He was deeply grieved, and said “I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens, for I am sorry that I have made them.” (Genesis 6:6-7) God does not like violence and disease in animals, any more than the violence and disease in people in this present world, and would never have declared it to be good.
So here is another challenge to those who think that God created using evolution – can you trust a God who told us the first world was good (when it was really full of struggle, disease and death) to mean anything by His promise to make a new ‘good’ heavens and earth which could therefore also be full of death and struggle and suffering?
More questions for those who claim Genesis can be interpreted as God using evolution to create, see our Ten Questions for Theistic Evolutionists here.
Evidence News vol. 19, No. 6
11 April 2019
Creation Research Australia
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