News Mash-up: Ancient Animals

レアジョブ英会話 Daily News Article Podcast

Keeping up with T. rex was easy: researchers Unlike its popular movie incarnations, Tyrannosaurus rex — the giant meat-eating dinosaur from the Cretaceous period — walked slower than previously thought, most likely ambling around at human walking speed, new Dutch research has found. Working with a three-dimensional computer model of “Trix,” a female T. rex skeleton at the Dutch Naturalis museum, researcher Pasha van Bijlert added computer reconstructions of muscles and ligaments to find that it’s likely that the dinosaur’s preferred speed was 4.61 km an hour, close to the walking pace of humans and horses. The study was published April 21 in the Royal Society Open Science journal. (Reuters) ‘Living fossil’ lives 100 years, pregnant for 5 The coelacanth — a weird giant fish still around from dinosaur times — can live for 100 years, a new study found. These slow-moving, people-sized fish of the deep, nicknamed “living fossils,” follow the opposite of the “live fast, die young” mantra. The nocturnal fish grow at an achingly slow pace. Females don’t hit sexual maturity until their late 50s, the study said, while male coelacanths are sexually mature at 40 to 69 years. Researchers figure pregnancy in the fish lasts about five years. Coelacanths, which have been around for 400 million years, were thought extinct until they were found alive in 1938 off South Africa. (AP) These articles were provided by The Japan Times Alpha.