Billions of T. rex roamed Earth, but fossils capture only a tiny slice
A 2021 study led by Charles Marshall estimated about 2.5 billion Tyrannosaurus rex lived over roughly 2.4 million years, with around 20,000 adults coexisting at any time. Yet by 2021 fewer than 100 individuals had been found, and only about 32 were relatively well-preserved post-juveniles in public museums, equating to roughly one recovered specimen for every 80 million animals that lived. The fossil record thus captures an infinitesimal sliver of the past, meaning much of what we know about T. rex rests on a tiny sample, even as paleontology extracts reliable insights from scant evidence.
