Dr. Dean Lomax

So two of the kind of main theories behind it is that one, which I'm probably, it's probably a combination of these things, but one of them is that if you imagine T-Rex, which has got such a massive kind of banana-sized teeth, this enormous kind of one plus meter long skull, bone-crunching jaws, like such a powerful bite, kind of think it's like 10 times whatever strength of a saltwater crocodile bite, like absolutely powerful.

Wow.

If you imagine that, attacking something like a triceratops with its jaws, the idea is that it could get its jaws around, say, the back of the neck behind the frill of a triceratops, and that the arms are kind of short enough that they could still slash with those claws, so they're in, like, really close.

Can you imagine, like, close combat?

So although they don't look like much, they're still pretty strong arms, and that's one idea, is that up close, kind of close combat, slashing as it's biting with the jaws.

The other one, a bit like...

with the kind of head bottom of Pachycephalosaurus, is more along the lines of some sort of sexual display as well.

Or even during mating, maybe it was like stroking the female.

Legitimately, that's one theory.

Yeah, that's one theory.

Is that...

Good question, Stevie.

So that was actually something that I remember way back when, when it was originally found and kind of over, obviously long before my time, but when it was originally found and other individuals have been found later, when they found the arms of T-Rex, they were a bit like, well, hang on a minute.

taking a piss here why you got this giant animal you know big meat eating theropod 10, 12, 30 metre long animal and it's got these puny puny arms but that was one idea but yeah we found too many now that have got their arms oh so it's just they're just confirmed at free oh yeah confirmed yeah and it's so weird could it not be you know like how chickens have tiny little wings yeah could they not have had wings there

So not necessarily like kind of proper wings that we see in chickens, but there's a good idea that it's so bizarre nowadays to even think like this.

But within the last 20, 30 years, we've had so many sort of extraordinary finds of dinosaurs with either soft tissues preserved or even with feathers.

And one of the oldest tyrannosaurs, so not quite the immediate kind of ancestor to T. rex, but one of them that lived way, way before T. rex, roughly 125 million years ago,

That, which is already a fossil under the feet of T-Rex, which is wild, but that animal was absolutely covered in feathers.

So there's a good chance that T-Rex would have had some sort of feathery covering.

So perhaps, we don't know for sure, and we don't know if we'll ever find feathers in T-Rex, but maybe it could have had some sort of feathers or something on its arms, which again would feed into the sexual kind of display in that.