#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park

The following is a conversation with Dave Hone, paleontologist, co-host of Terrible Lizards, and author on dinosaur behavior and ecology. This was a fun and fascinating one. Let us start with T. rex, maybe the most iconic predator in Earth’s history. Put us there: we are standing in front of one. What does it look like? What are the key features? It is gigantic.

I would be floored by the sheer size. Think killer whale on land: roughly twelve meters long, four to five meters tall at the head, around seven metric tons. In museums you rarely stand under one, so you miss how colossal it is. It is bigger than an African elephant. The head is huge and boxy, forward-facing eyes about tennis-ball sized, thick, oval teeth built to crush bone, and a short, powerful neck to hold that weight. The body is massively built; some carnivores may be longer, but T. rex is heavier. The arms are truly small and likely did very little relative to a mouth full of finger-sized teeth. The feet are enormous with a locking mid-foot that stabilizes each step and returns a bit of energy, making walking efficient. As a biped it drives the legs with giant tail muscles pulling on the thigh. Speed estimates top out around forty kilometers per hour, but it likely power-walked rather than truly ran; with meter-long legs it covers ground fast either way.

How screwed are we if we meet one? In Jurassic Park they said do not move—true? If it comes for us, what do we do? And what did it actually eat?

I doubt it would instantly see us as food. Predators usually learn what counts as prey, and we would look very strange. Most carnivores take prey about five to twenty percent of their own mass; an adult T. rex might deem us not worth the hassle. If it does come, the do-not-move idea is nonsense. It had huge eyes and excellent vision, probably strong in low light, plus a great sense of smell. In the open I would use our only superpower: range. I can throw a rock at its face from distance; pain and confusion may be enough. In woodland I would keep a big tree between us; I can pivot faster than a seven-ton animal and likely frustrate it.

Diet-wise it almost certainly focused on juveniles of giant herbivores rather than armored, horned, full-size adults. That fits modern ecology and our fossils: healed T. rex bites in bones show attacks victims survived, and stomach contents and bite-mark patterns show selective feeding—crushing with the big teeth, then scraping muscle off attachment crests with the small incisiform teeth at the front. Hunting likely emphasized endurance and approach over sprinting: close the gap under cover of darkness, then run prey down at a steady pace using great night vision and smell.

Scavenger or hunter—can we tell what was primary? Where did they live? And how many dinosaur species are we up to now?

It did both. We have clear scavenging—bite marks added after erosion on carcasses—and clear active predation—teeth embedded in bones that later healed. My bet is mainly hunting; true obligate scavengers need extreme, soaring-level efficiency we do not see on land. T. rex ranged across much of western North America; its closest cousin, Tarbosaurus, is in Asia. Dinosaurs were global, even Antarctica. We have on the order of one thousand six hundred valid species named and add roughly forty to fifty a year, with places like India, parts of South America, and Australia still underexplored.

How do you actually find and dig fossils? Walk me from a tiny claw tip to a mounted skeleton.

We still do it much like centuries ago. In fine limestones, quarry workers split thin layers and sometimes reveal exquisite skeletons. Otherwise we hike the right-age rocks and look for tiny hints of bone. I once saw just a few millimeters of a claw in a hillside that led to a near-complete raptor. Once we have something, we trace its outline, consolidate fragile bone with reversible glue dissolved by acetone, then jacket blocks in burlap and plaster. Depending on rock hardness, fragility, access rules, and budget, we use anything from chisels to jackhammers, backhoes, or helicopters to lift jackets. Big skeletons can take months in the field and years in the lab.

Using Stan as a case study—discovery, plotting, prep—and then the wild auction prices. Why did it go so high? And if I gave you ten billion dollars for dinosaurs, how would you spend it?

Stan was collected by the Black Hills Institute, which also made casts you see worldwide. In the field we strip overburden, plot every bone with grids or photogrammetry to read the burial story, jacket the blocks, then in the lab spend tens of thousands of hours preparing—Stan’s skull became a reference standard. The auction to Abu Dhabi for roughly thirty two million dollars shocked everyone, and a Stegosaurus has since gone higher despite being less complete; the market behaves like art. With ten billion, I would build a world-class museum and collections facility, and I would buy and run key fossil quarries. I would train workers, bonus every find, and send everything straight into public collections. Fossils are literally eroding away, so we should dig now and study forever. Tech helps a bit—drones, scanning—but bones and rock often have similar density, radioactivity is inconsistent, and methods like seismic or hospital MRI are limited for buried fossils.

Back to T. rex: what makes the skull unique, how did tyrannosaurs get so big and powerful, and is apex predator even the right term?

The skull is absurdly robust compared to giants like Giganotosaurus—more bone everywhere, fused nasal bones stiffening the snout, all to resist immense muscle forces. Tyrannosaurs ran for about one hundred million years. Early ones were small, feathered, long-armed; by the early Cretaceous you get larger, fuzzy forms like Yutyrannus, and later the big, broad-skulled tyrannosaurines with crushing bites. Size increase follows what we call Cope’s rule—efficiency and dominance rise with size, but so do rarity and slow reproduction. Within the group you see light, long-snouted alioramins likely taking small prey, and the heavy tyrannosaurines culminating in T. rex. I prefer arch predator here: T. rex was the dominant carnivore, not a predator of predators. It had almost no large carnivore competition and mostly targeted juveniles of massive herbivores.

Did T-Rex ever encounter mosasaurs, and how did their sizes compare?

Mosasaurs were generally larger. Jurassic World exaggerated, but real giants hit roughly 15 to 20 meters. I saw a skull cast in the UK that was about the size of a T-Rex skull.

On land, who could challenge a T-Rex—and do fast-biting smaller predators have a shot?

Nothing sensible. A few big tyrannosaurids or carcharodontosaurids come close in linear size but were likely lighter. My money stays on T-Rex’s bite. Long, slender jaws close faster but with less power—great for small prey. Velociraptor and kin were built for rat-sized meals; a swarm would struggle to bleed out a T-Rex.

What does the Jurassic franchise get wrong or right—and do the details matter artistically?

It is fiction, but it massively shapes public understanding. The big misses include the T-Rex can not see you if you do not move myth, raptor speed, intelligence, size, pack hunting, and the lack of feathers. On the plus side, T-Rex’s size and power-walking are portrayed well.

What kind of evidence would actually demonstrate pack hunting?

Bone beds like Deinonychus with Tenontosaurus are ambiguous—predator traps and toxin kills can pile up carnivores. Parallel tyrannosaur trackways are sparse and not proof of coordination. The gold standard would be multiple predator tracks overlapping each other in time as they converge on prey. I am not anti pack hunting; close relatives are poor guides, but some birds do it, and crocs show cooperation—dinosaurs could too. We just lack robust data.

What can we infer about social lives and sexing—and what were those crests for?

Cheetahs show sex-based sociality, so social systems vary. In dinosaurs we can sex laying females via medullary bone, but otherwise dimorphism is hard to detect. Theropod head crests and horns likely served socio-sexual signaling—honest signals with trade-offs, like black swan wing curls or lion manes. Herbivores could afford bigger displays.

Is beauty ever just beauty—peacocks and the sexy sons idea?

Two forces: handicap and sexy sons. Peacocks are largely handicap with some randomness. Preferences for novelty can snowball—swordtails versus mollies show females picking a male that looks different, and that preference and trait amplify across generations.

Do tyrannosaur ornaments hint at pair bonds or cooperative care?

Mutual ornamentation hints at mutual mate choice and shared parental effort, like in seabirds and starlings. But our sample sizes are tiny for most dinosaur species, so it is a cautious inference.

From bones, how far can you get on senses, smarts, and behavior without overreading single finds?

Endocasts show large olfactory and optic regions; inner ear scans reveal hearing. I am a zoologist, so I lean on living-animal logic. A primate-level T-Rex intelligence claim was quickly corrected—estimated neuron counts fit crocodile-like ranges. Crocs are capable, but not primates. Single stomach contents mislead; we rely on multiple independent lines.

You are writing a spinosaur book—what were they like, did they swim, and who wins versus T-Rex?

Spinosaurus had long crocodile-like jaws with conical teeth, a sail, a tall tail fin, and big foreclaws. I see it as a giant wader, not a strong swimmer—I have published critiques of the swimmer idea, and some authors later revised their view. In a fight, T-Rex wins: Spino’s long, thin jaws and weak lateral neck lose to T-Rex’s enormous bite and exceptionally strong neck. The Jurassic Park 3 Spino looked decent for its era but was too bulky.

Beyond that, what else do the films get right or wrong—and is accuracy actually harder?

Pteranodon accuracy swings wildly across films. Accuracy is no harder than inaccuracy—yet they added teeth to beaked Gallimimus. I love that the Jurassic Foundation funded real research, but treat the movies as fiction; people have even expected live dinosaurs in museums.

Hard-to-fossilize behaviors—tools, middens, cannibalism?

Tools rarely preserve; nests maybe. Communal latrines likely existed, but coprolites are rare and hard to assign. T-Rex cannibalism happened occasionally—there are feeding marks on T-Rex bones—but carnivores avoid eating carnivores due to parasites unless desperate.

Extinction, possible refugia, and whether humans owe their existence to the impact?

An asteroid hit near Yucatan approximately 66 million years ago; ejecta drove rapid climate change and ecosystem collapse. Big terrestrial animals suffered most; water buffered aquatic life. Some dinosaurs probably persisted locally for a while, but repopulation is unlikely due to inbreeding and changed environments. Without the impact, humans probably would not have evolved—dinosaurs were doing fine, and post-impact mammals still faced competition from giant predatory birds.

If dinosaurs had not gone extinct sixty-six million years ago, would we even be here, and were they mostly dumb?

Dinosaurs dominated for well over a hundred million years—if you saw anything bigger than a raccoon, it was probably a dinosaur. They were not dumb. That idea comes from old speciesism and bad hypotheses like mammals eating all their eggs. Reptiles are not inherently stupid; that ranking mindset is just wrong.

Could a human-level intelligence have evolved from dinosaurs?

People have imagined it—Dale Russell’s dinosauroid was based on a big-brained troodontid—but it was very anthropomorphic. That said, parrots and crows match apes on some tasks. Some dinosaurs were likely extremely smart.

What actually sparks big shifts like ours—thumbs, fire, sociality?

It is many pressures at once: sociality, changing environments, forests shrinking and pushing apes onto the ground. Similar dynamics play out elsewhere. Islands drive weird evolution, but those places rarely fossilize, so we are missing some of the wildest dinosaurs. Still, dinosaurs followed ecological rules and scaling like any animals; reconstructing their biology is hard but doable.

So, dragons?

They are real to the imagination, not to paleontology. Myths likely did not come from dinosaur fossils. There are buffalo stones—broken ammonites that resemble tiny bison—valued by local tribes. But if fossils had shaped dragon myths, you would expect similar creatures across cultures seeing similar bones, and you do not. More likely it is snakes, lizards, and storytelling. Real sea beasts like colossal squid or dugongs could absolutely seed legends.

I marvel at Earth’s alien-feeling life—Amazon insects—and I wonder about aliens out there.

Same. Velvet worms, caecilians—their biology is mind-blowing. I love teaching diversity of life; students are stunned that the strangest things are normal for their group.

What has studying dinosaurs taught you about evolution?

The timescales fry my brain. Change often pulses after stress. Evolution is a numbers game: millions of animals, over millions of years, with huge broods. Ocean sunfish can release hundreds of millions of eggs. With the right selective pressure, rare variants become common.

And the big innovations—like fish stepping onto land?

Evolution is compromise and repurposing—descent with modification. Limbs share the one-bone, two-bone, many-bone pattern. Trade-offs and genetic linkages constrain options—lion manes, eye blind spots. Lungs likely evolved from swim bladders. Tiktaalik did not just appear; there were precursors, like frogfish that clamber through seaweed.

So traits often do many jobs?

Exactly. Elephant tusks likely began as sexual signals and then did everything from digging to fighting. Avoid binary thinking with T. rex arms or Spinosaurus tails; look at ancestral mini versions. Giraffe necks were debated, but feeding is the primary driver.

Birds really are dinosaurs?

Yes—roughly ten to eleven thousand living dinosaur species are birds. That is becoming common knowledge. Birds descend directly from small theropods, just as we are apes.

Did they have feathers, and why did feathers evolve?

Feathers predate birds by tens of millions of years. We have them in tyrannosaurs, dromaeosaurs, troodontids, and many groups. Birds took a battering at the extinction, but small lineages survived. Feathers likely evolved for insulation and signaling. They let you change color, molt seasonally, and display dynamically—peacocks can shed showy plumes, whereas a triceratops frill is year-round.

After all that, how has this changed your sense of Earth’s beauty?

I am in awe of all life—lungfish to butterflies to pterosaurs. I love predation dynamics. The giants do dazzle—wingspans of about ten meters make marabou storks feel small. We gravitate to size, and dinosaurs, marine reptiles, and flying reptiles did size, diversity, and longevity for over a hundred million years. They dominated almost everywhere.

And that dinosaur head next to you?

It is a cast of a juvenile Protoceratops from Mongolia. I work on them because we have embryos to big adults from one place and a tight window—about a hundred thousand years—so we can do real population biology. Sexing is hard, as with gharials, except for the largest males. Medullary bone in breeding females can help at mass mortality sites. Honestly, another hundred Protoceratops would teach us more about dinosaur biology than dozens of new species.

Paleontology really is Sherlock Holmes work. Thank you for the incredible conversation and for all your work.

Thank you for having me. I hope I did not wear out my welcome with dinosaur talk.

Thank you for listening to this conversation with Dave Hone. To support this podcast, please subscribe. I will leave you with words from Carl Sagan.