Why having a T. rex as a pet isn’t as bad an idea as you might think

The Cosmos Podcast

Welcome to a Cosmos Insights podcast, where we talk to scientists in Australia about the impact of their work.

Big dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus rex have been extinct for 66 million years, but it’s still fun to think about how they might interact with humans.

So, which dinosaur would make a good pet? Honestly, there are many decent options, but how can you look past the king, T. rex?

Cosmos journalist Evrim Yazgin recently spoke to world-famous palaeontologist Jack Horner – the inspiration behind Dr Alan Grant in Steven Spielberg’s 1993 classic film Jurassic Park. As a researcher from the University of Montana, Horner has spent a lot of time studying some of North America’s most famous dinosaurs like T. rex.

Horner says that certain biases in how we imagine dinosaurs lived and behaved aren’t quite up to date when it comes to the science. Rex, for example, probably wasn’t as much a hunter as we might like to believe.

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