Can You Draw a T. Rex Correctly? - nationalgeographic.com

- STONES & BONES

Over the last 25 years, a pair of professors have collected thousands of students' drawings trying to accurately depict a T. rex, but few get it right. Whether Barney, cheap plastic toys, or dinosaur chicken nuggets are to blame, here’s what most people get wrong.

Stones & Bones is back! T o d ay w e e x plor e why i t ’s so d ifficul t for p e opl e t o corr e c t ly d r a w a T. r e x. Pu t your e mail h e r e t o mak e sur e you g e t e v e ry Stones & Bones.

In 2011, I was in the middle of interviewing Warren Allmon, a professor of paleontology at Cornell University, for my college newspaper when he told me to take out a pen and a piece of paper. Then he gave me a simple instruction I would never forget: “Draw a T. r e x.”

I was perplexed but figured I would ace it. After all, as a child, I was obsessed with dinosaurs, had shelves full of figurines, and loved to doodle Spinosaurus, Brachiosaurus, and, of course, T yrannosaurus r e x.

So, after adorning my drawing with razor-sharp teeth and claws, I turned the paper to Allmon for approval. He responded with something along the lines of “That’s nice—but it’s completely wrong. Why did you draw it standing up straight? Scientists haven’t thought that T. rex stood up straight since the 1970s.”

My heart sank. He was right; the posture was all wrong. Why did I sketch it with a vertical vertebral column as if it were a 21st-century human? And how could I have drawn the regal tyrant dragging its tail?

Allmon, perhaps noticing my silent spiraling, told me not to worry, as my results were unsurprising. An auditorium’s worth of students had made the same mistake before me. For years, Allmon, the director of the Paleontological Research Institution in Ithaca, New York, and his colleague Robert Ross, also a paleontologist at PRI, had asked students to draw a T. r e x. They collected the data and in 2013 published their results.

They found that 72 percent of college students and 63 percent of precollege students they surveyed drew T. r e x standing upright rather than in a correct horizontal posture.

In fact, their drawings were closer to what T. r e x looked like when paleontologists first put it on display in 1905, with a spinal angle of approximately 57 degrees to a horizontal line. Scientists today display it with a spinal angle of 0 to 10 degrees relative to the horizontal.

Allmon attributed the disconnect to unscientific and outdated “dino crap,” as he calls it. Think things like Barn e y & Fri e n d s, cheap plastic toys, or dinosaur chicken nuggets that have imprinted themselves upon the public’s perception of dinosaurs despite how far the scientific literature has progressed.

“For most people, all of our dinosaur knowledge goes to hell once we turn about seven,” he told me at the time. Mesozoic mania, it seems, rarely continues into one’s adulthood.

All this has stuck with me since college because it’s such a clear example of the gulf between what the public thinks about dinosaurs and what the science says. But it’s been 15 years since I mucked up my T. r e x, and I was curious if Allmon and Ross are still running their experiments. And if so, has anything changed? Are we still drawing T. r e x wrong?

Turns out they never stopped quizzing their students. Ross now has 25 years’ worth of data. By his conservative estimate, he and Allmon have collected more than 5,000 drawings from their college students at both Cornell and nearby Ithaca College.

During a recent video call, he gave me a sneak peek as he opened a spreadsheet with photos from his most recent class.

The first image that popped up was a T. r e x drawn with a horizontal posture, and its tail lifted off the ground. Success? Not quite, as I couldn’t help myself from blurting out, “Wait, that one has four legs!”

“Oh my God, that’s truly horrific,” said Allmon.

The next one looked more promising as it correctly had only two legs, and the tail was in the air. But it was standing up straight and had spikes running down its back like Godzilla, as well as “too many fingers on the hands,” as Allmon pointed out.

Ross clicked through a few more, and some did seem to be scientifically accurate, though those were in the minority. I secretly felt a little vindicated for my college self, as it seemed that even today we’re still messing up T. r e x.