Ah, the T-Rex. King of the tyrant lizards. Ruler of children’s imaginations the world over. With its savagery and you-look-tasty-enough-to-eat smile…could we have domesticated it?
Ah, the T-Rex. King of the tyrant lizards. Ruler of children’s imaginations the world over. With its savagery and you-look-tasty-enough-to-eat smile…could we have domesticated it? Dr. Richard Kissel is here to help us figure it all out. He’s the VP of Education at The DoSeum in San Antonio, Texas, and a total T-Rex fanboy.
A few of the curiosities you’ll uncover in this episode:
To learn more about Dr. Richard Kissel and the DoSeum in San Antonio, Texas, visit www.thedoseum.org
Curious State is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast hosted and produced by Doug Fraser.
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Doug 00:00
Imagine your weird neighbor, you know the one with a shed out back that no one's allowed to go in. But maybe that door was left ajar one day. And that's when he saw something strange, a jagged metal contraption, a hodgepodge of wiring. And in the middle of it all, was a seat pulled from a lawnmower. Wait, hold on second. Is that a time machine? What if it was, where and when would you go? What kind of time traveler would you be? The history rewriter fending off assassinations, a lover revisiting the moment when the one got away? Or how about strapping in and venturing back 65 million years to see a friggin T Rex. Picture her standing in front of you. She's a whopping 18 feet tall. If you were in the second story of your house and peeked out the window, you'd be eye to eye and what an eye. It's believed to have been bigger than a tennis ball with a binocular field of view wider than a moderate hawk’s. But you're probably staring at its teeth right now, aren't you? They’re sharp swords as long as a banana. Her legs can send her sprinting at speeds of up to 25 miles an hour, and she could rip off up to 220 pounds of flesh in a single bite. Is it possible that she and her tyrant brethren could have been domesticated? Dr. Richard Kissel is here via zoom to help us figure it all out.
Richard 01:25
It is my favorite dinosaur without question. The skull itself is it's a sports car of reptilian anatomy, it's it's beautiful, and just how sleek it is but yet how strong and robust it is, you know, with these massive teeth sticking out of its frame at different lengths because of the continual replacement this kind of this gnarly smile.
Doug 01:48
I'm Doug Fraser and this is Curious State. So our Zoom call starts and I see Dr. Kissel's background, which is a bunch of dinosaurs on bookshelves and displayed prominently, of course is the T Rex, but it's his shirt that catches my attention. It's light blue with a repeated pattern of old school red rollerskates, a delightful fit for his job.
Richard 02:12
I am here in San Antonio, Texas at the DoSeum. Um, it is a children's museum. And I am the Vice President of education here and for my graduate work actually did pursue paleontology through the department's of geosciences, and then up at Toronto Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.
Doug 02:31
Based off of what you've learned about the T Rex over the years, do you think it would have been possible for us to have domesticated it?
Richard 02:39
The short answer is yes, as long as you could get a few T Rex together, as long as you could get them to successfully reproduce. And if you were intentionally choosing individuals to reproduce, to continue the traits that you wanted to continue, then yes, technically, boom, you are domesticating A T. Rex, the natural extension of that is, well, how far could you go in that process? And could you basically have T Rex as a pet, for example?
Doug 03:11
Do you think? Would it be possible?
Richard 03:14
Would it be possible? The question would be just how much patience Do you have?
Doug 03:21
Mankind has quite the patience when it comes to domesticating animals. I mean, we've been doing it for a while, after all, just look at the 30,000 years or so since a wolf first approached our fire and we were like, Hey, bud, what do you say we team up maybe start with hunting together and then in a few thousand years or so will dress you up in cute holiday sweaters and the treat you like a fluffy little human? How's that sound?
Richard 03:45
You got to go all in if you want to domesticate an organism, especially one with a slightly longer lifespan, because you're going to need that generation after generation after generation of reproduction, to for lack of a better phrase, kind of shape the animal how you want it, or to use a more technical phrase artificial selection. And with T Rex, having a decent lifespan, but not nearly as long as we might have thought, up to around the age of 30. And that would pretty much be it for them.
Doug 04:19
So if you not only want to domesticate a T Rex, but also have one as a pet, there are three questions you need to answer. Number one,
Richard 04:27
How much time do I have?
Doug 04:28
Number two?
Richard 04:30
What kind of capacity does that organism have to be domesticated? It's no coincidence that our best friends are pets. The dogs and the cats are carnivorous creatures. They typically tend to be you know, just to put it bluntly, a little more bright than their herbivorous cousins. damn sick bird. And there are multiple reasons for that. Obviously, if you're a herbivore, eating grass, you don't really need to be strategic about eating that grass. But if you're a big cat on the savanna, and your prey also has a brain and can move quickly and is often bigger than you, you need to have some strategy built in there. And so just being carnivorous tends to lend itself toward a greater capacity for intelligence plus meat is much more rich in calories than eating strictly plants to which helps feed and permit the evolution of a larger brain. And as we connect those puzzle pieces, and we try to see what the picture looks like, even though we're probably missing 75% of the puzzle pieces. T Rex as a predator had to have some level of smarts associated with it, you could probably have it do some learned behaviors, I would guess.
Doug 05:53
And the third and final question you need to ask yourself before jumping off the Jurassic deep end and trying to make a T Rex, your pet? What's your budget, because that ain't gonna be cheap. Let's start with space for romping around with that big head and tiny arms.
Richard 06:10
There was a study that came out, I want to say earlier this year or late last year. And they were asking the question just how many T Rex have ever lived. And they were looking at a formula that I believe was developed for the population density of mammals. And the example that they used was that in the area the size of Washington DC, that could sustain two T Rex, or the state of California would be between 3,500-4,000 T Rex Wow. And so they needed quite a bit of room to roam, at least according to this model.
Doug 06:50
They also have pretty specific environmental needs. At the end of the Cretaceous period, when the T Rex was living large, you could find them in sticky, stinky sweat inducing swamp regions,
Richard 07:01
Kind of like Louisiana, southern Louisiana, that Mississippi Delta type environment. And so you'd want a pretty lush, pretty humid, pretty wet environment for these things, if you wanted them to be perfectly feeling at home. In that ton of space, of course, you know, lions, the range they have in the wild compared to what we have them in zoos, for example, is very, very different as well too a very large natural range. If you were feeding them every day, if they didn't have to worry about finding the food, I'm sure they would be happier in a much, much smaller space than what we were just talking about, to make sure that they're still healthy and fit both physically and mentally, of course.
Doug 07:52
I imagine they also needed quite a bit of food to keep going, how much did they eat per day,
Richard 07:59
I found quite a bit of range in that. With some folks saying 40,000 calories a day would be all they needed. And then another study saying that they basically needed the equivalent of 80 adult humans. And so if you want to say 2500 calories per human, the humans you're looking at 200,000 calories per day.
Doug 08:25
If you average those out, presuming they're eating pure protein and fat, you're looking at about 70 pounds per day. Let's say you're feeding them whole chickens, which are about $1.28 per pound. That's 8960 per day, and you're starting small with just three T Rex at your ranch. That's $268.80 per day, or $98,112 a year. To sum it all up, okay, I'm pausing here to appreciate that accidental math pun. To sum it all up, to feed three T Rex over a 30 year lifespan is going to run you $8,830,080. Those dudes were constantly munching in their teenage years, their massive caloric intake led to impressive growth spurts. But how do we know that
Richard 09:12
by looking at the rings within the growth rings within some of the fossils we have. And the greatest, the more spacing you have between the rings, obviously the more growth you had that year. And you see the greatest spacing in their teenage years, they were putting on about 1500 pounds per year. So that's about four pounds per day, which is quite a growth spurt.
Doug 09:40
My time with Dr. Kissel was winding down but there were still two more things I needed to know before He skated out of our zoom chat. But before I can even ask him he dropped this bomb of pure ecstasy on me about T Rex breeding.
Richard 09:53
If over time, many, many, many generations. If you kept selecting for smaller and smaller individuals to reproduce, could you get a teacup T Rex that you could, you know, push in a stroller or carry in a bag and take on an airplane? Like I said, we have the commitment to do it possibly might still be a little snippy and not quite as “intelligent” as a dog or cat. Probably not. But I think you can get there and at least be somewhat satisfied with what you have.
Doug 10:25
So about those two things I needed to know. This is a long shot, but I am curious, can we infer anything about its personality?
Richard 10:35
That's why I love these evolutionary trees and these phylogenetic trees because you can actually use them to predict they just don't tell you how things are related but they help fill in those missing gaps. Now we know that birds have evolved from meat eating dinosaurs, not too far removed from T Rex T rex is pretty close. T rex is up there. T rex is pretty close to the raptors, which are pretty close to what you would say are our birds. And I think really what you probably do is look at living birds today to see what kind of potential personality you get in a T Rex. And here in San Antonio, we have these wonderful birds called grackles. And I just love them because they have so much personality to them. And they kind of have the personality of a cat too. They kind of don't care. You know how a cat just kind of walk up, look at you and push something off the desk and walk away. grackles have the equivalent type of behavior, they'll just walk over take your food and they won't scurry away. They'll just kind of eat it in front of your face. Slowly strut away. And so it's funny every time I see these grackles which have wonderful calls of beeps and whistles I always think that's probably what a little dinosaur would have looked like kind of got a little edge to it slightly annoying kind of knows it's running, it's got the run of the place is going to push the boundary more than it is going to be careful about the boundary
Doug 12:09
And finally the last question that's been eating at me. Would you take the job as a T Rex trainer?
Richard 12:17
You would have to, you would have to take that chance and see what it would look like. I don't know if I would try to be a trainer so to speak. I don't know if I’d try to get a traveling circus going, with my cap and my horn for speaking to the audience and doing the three ring circus thing. But I could see myself retiring with quite a bit of acreage and having a few T Rex out there on the ranch and just kind of appreciating them maybe from a safe distance or within an armored vehicle. Just kind of doing their thing.
Doug 12:58
Could we have domesticated a T Rex? Dr. Richard Kissel thinks so, if you could acquire the patience and abundance of resources it would take, of course. There are tons of other considerations we didn't even touch on like how much are vet bills and what happens if your T Rex eats the vet? What's the going rate for a T Rex sitter when you're out of town? What's poop clean up like? That last one wouldn't be much of a problem if you had a teacup T Rex. Can you imagine that teeny little fellow roaming your backyard and letting out little screeches, chases squirrels, and drops miniature poop. All fantasies aside, the reality is that we know so little about the king of a tyrant lizards, we've mainly focused on their savagery, their identity as primitive beasts since we first discovered a partial T Rex skeleton in 1902. We're just beginning to understand them as animals 120 years later, in the vast spindle of time, that's hardly a tug of the thread. The puzzle pieces are fractured, our knowledge is still so limited. But as long as we keep asking questions, we'll continue dusting off information that's been in hiding for over 60 million years. So who's to say what's still out there, waiting to be discovered? To learn more about Dr. Richard Kissel and how you can visit the DoSeum in San Antonio. Visit thedoseum.com That's thedoseum.com. If you have any questions, comments or ideas for future episodes, email me at curious@quickanddirtytips.com If you prefer talking over typing, leave me a voicemail at 757-541-8471. For more information about the show and where you can find us across the internet. Check out our show notes or visit quickanddirtytips.com. Special thanks to the Quick and Dirty Tips team. Adam Cecil our Audience Development and Podcast Manager, Morgan Christiansen, Podcasts and Advertising Operations Specialist, Emily Miller, Assistant Manager, Davina Tomlin, Marketing and Publicity Assistant, and our trusty intern, Brendan Picha. Curious State is hosted and produced by me Doug Fraser for the Quick and Dirty Tips network, which is a division of Macmillan Publishers. Until next time, stay curious.