8-3 The Brain Of The T. Rex

Narrator: Tyrannosaurus Rex. The very name means tyrant lizard king. But was this tyrant merely a bumbling giant, or a calculating killer?

By getting inside the head of a T-Rex, we can find out the answer.

An X-ray of an ancient fossilized braincase shows what a T-Rex's brain could have actually looked like.

The scan reveals that areas of the brain associated with smell, the olfactory bulbs, were huge in proportion to the rest of T-Rex's brain.

Comparing his wits to a distant relative, the alligator, the part of T-Rex's brain devoted solely to smell dwarfed that of his cousin.

And if you think of alligators, who are able to smell their food easily, the T-Rex could have possibly had a sense of smell more like a bloodhound, who can track its prey over a hundred miles away.

Scientists also believe that T-Rex had killer eyesight, with enormous eye sockets the size of softballs and a narrow snout.

T-Rex had an unobstructed line of sight. It's also thought that he could have had a type of stereoscopic vision, similar to humans and predatory birds.

Stereoscopic vision allows us to see depth, which could enable a predator like the T-Rex to see through camouflage on its prey.

And finally, if you look inside T-Rex's skull, there are a series of large air chambers that connect to the middle eardrum. This network increased his sensitivity to low-frequency infrasonic waves, sound that's lower than the normal limit of human hearing.

Larger animals like elephants produce infrasound waves that can travel over a hundred miles through ground and are sensed by other herds.

This infrasonic hearing ability could have allowed T-Rex to detect vibrations made by other dinosaurs, making it possible for him to echolocate his next meal.

Tyrannosaurus Rex was truly a triple threat, with killer sight, smell, and hearing. Not a seven-ton moron, but more likely a cunning and calculating bloodhound of the Cretaceous period.