The strongest bite on land
Its bite was the most powerful of any land animal known. It could crush bone.
The great hunters · Theropods
Tyrannosaurus rex
Tyrant lizard king · tie-RAN-oh-SORE-us REX
A huge hunter with an enormous head, teeth the size of bananas, powerful hind legs and tiny two-fingered arms.
- Size
- About 12m long; 8 to 9 tonnes
- Lived
- About 68 to 66 million years ago
- Found in
- Western North America
Stomps after you, head low. Move your pointer and see.
To scale
How big was it?
The bars are drawn to the same scale. On these pages the animals are sized in proportion to each other as far as a screen allows: the giants are shrunk a little and the smallest are enlarged, so that you can see them all.
Good to know
Six things about the tyrannosaurus
Small arms, not weak ones
Its arms were only about a metre long, but each could probably lift a couple of hundred kilograms.
Teeth like bananas
The biggest teeth were around 20 centimetres long, counting the root.
Sue and Stan
The most complete skeletons have nicknames. Sue, in Chicago, is about 90 per cent complete.
One of the last dinosaurs
It lived right at the end, and was there when the asteroid struck.
Sharp senses
It had forward-facing eyes for judging distance, and an excellent sense of smell.
The real thing
Photos of the tyrannosaurus
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Photos are from Wikimedia Commons, used under the free licences shown. They have been resized, and cropped where they appear in link previews.
What it ate
Large plant-eaters such as Triceratops and Edmontosaurus. It hunted, and it also ate animals it found dead.
How we know
More than fifty skeletons are known. Triceratops bones carry its tooth marks, and some had healed, so the prey was alive when bitten.
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