Tyrant Lizard Queen offers a nuanced look at T. rex
The book fleshes out the life of this fearsome predator
What was T. rex really like? In Tyrant Lizard Queen, paleontologist Riley Black paints a portrait of a misunderstood dinosaur.
Tyrant Lizard Queen
Riley Black
St. Martin’s Press, $29.00
Tyrannosaurus rex is the ultimate villain. Hollywood writers have pitted the ferocious dinosaur against King Kong or tasked it with terrorizing children in an SUV. And museum curators prop up casts of T. rex skeletons to show them mercilessly downing prey, thrilling millions of visitors around the world each year.
It’s easy to see why. This 12-meter-long, eight-metric-ton carnivore needed to down nearly 150 kilograms of meat a day, often pulverizing and swallowing bones in the process. But in Tyrant Lizard Queen, paleontologist and science writer Riley Black asks readers to “consider the animal behind the kaiju-like façade.”
Black enlists Snag, a fictional T. rex trying to survive in a forest set in prehistoric Utah. When we meet our heroine, she’s newly hatched and already under constant threat. A pterosaur picks off four of her siblings and long-necked Alamosaurus threatens to trample her remaining kin.
Tyrant Lizard Queen follows Snag through the pit stops typical in many coming-of-age stories: peer rivalries and first loves. Enter Sweet, a fellow female T. rex. Their rivals-to-lovers arc sees the teen tyrants face off over food and later attempt mating, a clumsy encounter as awkward as any first kiss. When the eventual father of Snag’s brood turns on her in an attempt at cannibalism, the two team up to dispatch him.
But it’s not just Snag’s relationship status that’s complicated. The research behind how exactly a T. rex like Snag played, slept, fought and mated can be spotty, at best. After all, behaviors are difficult to capture in the fossil record.
To fill these gaps, Black draws inspiration from modern animals, including crocodilians and flightless birds such as emus. She outlines this process in the appendix, offering a behind-the-scenes look at how one brings the most feared yet beloved dinosaur to life. “No two visions of the same dinosaur are the same,” Black writes. “Plonk two paleontologists down in front of the same Tyrannosaurus skeleton and … they will imagine two different tyrannosaurs.”
Black’s T. rex is less diva and more underdog. The killer queen we meet was 80 million years in the making, Black points out. The evolutionary journey from a pipsqueak skirting the edge of the food web to a dino monarch wasn’t easy. “The number of things that had to go strangely right for a tyrannosaur to end up getting the rock-star billing in a museum hall is astounding,” Black writes.
And like a misunderstood starlet who has finally made it big, Snag has depth. She both shaped and was shaped by her environment. Tyrannosaur hunting habits “nudged other dinosaurs to develop speed, armor and the ability to hide,” Black writes. Meanwhile, the actions of prey dinosaurs engineered the very habitat that a T. rex like Snag needed to thrive. Seed-riddled herbivore dung helped provide plant cover for T. rex on the prowl and rainwater-filled sauropod footprints served as T. rex watering holes. “Habitat changes the hunt,” Black writes. “And the hunt changes the habitat.”
Tyrant Lizard Queen brings Earth’s greatest carnivore to life in a way that defies the stereotype of T. rex as a mere flesh ripper. Still, the unanswered questions surrounding this iconic beast stalk Snag through the pages. But Black embraces the uncertainty, arguing that such riddles have fueled our century-long investigation into this terrible lizard.
“The core of paleontology is imagination,” Black writes. “Dinosaurs thrive in the gaps our questions create.”
Buy Tyrant Lizard Queen from Bookshop.org. Science News is a Bookshop.org affiliate and will earn a commission on purchases made from links in this article.
