By Jacopo Prisco, CNN
(CNN) — Scientists may have finally solved the riddle of Tyrannosaurus rex’s small arms, which have always stood out as the oddest feature in the mightiest of dinosaurs, prompting jokes and a century-plus debate on their purpose and evolutionary history.
At about 3 feet long, the arms of T. rex were less than a third of the length of the dinosaur’s legs and looked noticeably disproportionate in a body that could span more than 40 feet in larger adults.
T. rex was one of many meat-eating dinosaurs with puny arms, and over the years scientists have come up with theories for the forelimbs’ function, including holding or pinning down prey and impressing potential mates during courtship. More recent studies have suggested that the arms became smaller to reduce the risk of being bitten during feeding frenzies, while a longstanding theory is that they are simply vestigial — they had no practical purpose and therefore shrank. But a consensus is lacking.
Now, a new study published May 20 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B aims to settle the debate once and for all. Based on an analysis of 85 species of dinosaurs, the study concluded that tiny arms were an evolutionary trade-off caused by another body part becoming ever larger and taking up resources — the skull.
“If you’re a dinosaur with a very strongly put together skull, chances are you’re going to have very small forelimbs,” said Charlie Roger Scherer, a doctoral student in the department of Earth sciences at University College London and the study’s lead author. “And it doesn’t really matter how big you are — you could be 1 ton in weight, or 10 tons in weight. If you have a strong skull, you’re going to have relatively small arms.”
The reason is that “evolution doesn’t like to have everything all at once,” as Scherer put it, because it tends to prioritize one thing over another. “If you want to focus on using your head to bring down large prey, you don’t really want to be putting much effort in keeping your arms long and with claws, because you’re probably not really going to need that, so evolution kind of says, ‘We don’t need the arms anymore, so let’s shrink them down and put more energy into keeping the skull strong and using that as the primary weapon.’”
Previous research already suggested a link between shrinking forelimbs and growing skulls in carnivorous dinosaurs, but the new study is the first, according to Scherer, to identify this trend in five different groups of dinosaurs and add statistical support to the theory.
A primary weapon
To reach their conclusion, researchers measured the forelimbs and the skull bones from the pool of 85 dinosaur species, using both fossils and data from existing scientific literature.
They also devised a new way of quantifying the strength of the skull, looking at factors such as overall size, how the bones fit together and bite force. Doing so allowed them to arrange every skull on a scale. Not surprisingly, T. rex scored the highest, followed by Tyrannotitan, another massive meat eater that lived in what’s now Argentina during the Early Cretaceous, or about 30 million years before T. rex.
Other than in tyrannosaurids, the group that includes T. rex