Dave Hone

T. rex’s durable advantage was an extreme package of scale, force and locomotor efficiency, not cinematic sprinting. At roughly 12 meters long, seven-plus metric tons and perhaps 40 kph only at the upper estimate, it was “an orca on land,” power-walking on spring-efficient feet while a 2.5–3-meter tail muscle drove each stride. Hone said some contemporaneous carnivores were only a little bigger than Velociraptor; Lex compared that ecological gap to lions alongside a weasel, while its likely prey base contained abundant juvenile megaherbivores.

The best-supported hunting thesis is lower-risk endurance predation on juveniles, combined with opportunistic scavenging. Modern and fossil evidence suggests carnivores typically take prey around 5–20% of their own mass; young dinosaurs were smaller, poorly armored, inexperienced and pushed into inferior feeding grounds. Healed tyrannosaur bites establish active attacks, while bites laid over weathered bone establish scavenging: “They’re obviously both.”

Paleontology’s core model risk is mistaking one preserved event for a species-wide strategy. A Microraptor containing one fish does not establish fish specialization, three parallel tyrannosaur trackways do not establish coordinated hunting, and several bodies in one quarry may have washed together. Hone’s preferred standard is converging, independent evidence—mechanics, isotopes, stomach contents, bite marks, tracks and living-animal analogues—paired with explicit alternative explanations.

The commercial fossil market is pricing celebrity and scarcity far more aggressively than scientific utility. Stan sold for $31.8 million, while the less complete Stegosaurus Apex later reached roughly $40 million; yet Sophie, described as by far the most complete known Stegosaurus, sold about a decade earlier for roughly £250,000, or $400,000. Hone’s reaction is essentially art-market logic: “It’s worth what people will pay for it,” with the 100-fold repricing difficult to explain through specimen quality alone.

The highest-return research capital may be infrastructure and repeated sampling rather than trophy acquisitions. Given $10 billion, Hone would spend perhaps half a billion on a first-rate museum, fund excavations from a durable endowment, and buy productive quarries so trained workers could send every find directly to public collections. His sharper point is that paleontological data are perishable—“our science is literally disappearing”—while drones, seismic sensing, radioactivity detection and medical scanners have not displaced people walking exposed rock.

Jurassic Park demonstrates how scientific authenticity can compound—or erode—an entertainment franchise’s cultural value. The first film broadly captured T. rex’s size and power-walking gait, but the franchise embedded inventions such as motion blindness, giant featherless Velociraptors and assumed pack hunting; later films even regressed from accurate models despite accuracy requiring “no more hassle.” The offsetting legacy is tangible: the Jurassic Foundation has funded dinosaur research and helped young scientists enter the field.

Evolution rewards scale and specialization during normal conditions, then reverses those gains under regime change. Bigger animals gain efficiency, dominance and dietary reach, but require more land and food, reproduce slowly and carry less population-level genetic diversity; the asteroid-driven climate shock therefore hit large terrestrial dinosaurs especially hard. Birds—10,500–11,000 living dinosaur species—show that survival came through small-bodied lineages, while T. rex shows why the locally dominant incumbent can still be the most exposed when the environment resets.

🔗 Original source & video: Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park | Lex Fridman Podcast #480