How long do you think it could keep up that 18 mph pace? Usain Bolt certainly couldn't hold his top speed for 100 meters, and he's about one-hundredth the size of a 17,600-pound (8,000-kilograms) dinosaur. It would probably get exhausted pretty quickly, though. rex would gain on you fast, given its relatively enormous stride. Once it's spotted you and started the chase, the T. rex coming way before it sees you, so you'd again have a good head start. If you were just wandering around in Dinosaurland, you'd likely see the T. rex has you beat in pure speed, but even if you were racing from a starting line, you'd have a healthy lead before the dinosaur even got its massive body into proper running position. In a predator/prey scenario, your relatively tiny size gives you the advantage. You're going to be running for your life. You're not going to be running a friendly race against this T. But as long as we're playing this suspension of disbelief game, let's be "realistic" here. rex is going to crush the average human in a race. A four-minute miler runs 15 mph (24 kph). Usain Bolt, the world's fastest man, reached a top speed of 27.79 mph (44.16 kph) when he set the world record in the 100-meter sprint in 2009. rex didn't come close to being the fastest dinosaur - that honor went to the chicken-size Compsognathus, which clocked in at 40 mph (64 kph) - but it was fairly swift. With a maximum pace of about 18 mph (29 kph), the T. And based on that, they computed the running speeds of many dinosaur species. They were able to estimate muscle mass and predict how dinosaurs used those muscles to move their bodies. rex using animated computer models based solely on information gleaned from fossils. Scientists at the University of Manchester in England actually computed the top speed of a T. We do have real numbers to work with, though. We'll just have to be satisfied with conjecture about what would happen in such an amazing situation. There's obviously no way to test it, however fun it would be to hop into a time machine, blast back to the Cretaceous period and challenge the nearest Tyrannosaurus rex (T. Let's start off this article by saying that we realize we'll never have a definitive answer to this question.
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