HEADSCRATCHERS

Our expert, Darren Naish, has the answers to all of your dinosaur questions.

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Hi, I'm Darren. I am a dinosaur expert and I also study marine reptiles and flying reptiles that were around at the same time. I worked closely with the Prehistoric Planet: Discovering Dinosaurs team to make sure the film was completely accurate and up-to-date. Go to lightroom.uk to find out more.

How do we know that T. rex could swim? Tilly

All modern animals, essentially, can swim, and the animals most similar to tyrannosaurs in basic body shape - that's big birds like emus and ostriches - are good at it. For those simple reasons alone, we fully expect dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus rex to be competent swimmers.

A few details from the fossil record provide direct evidence of swimming for dinosaurs such as T. rex. We actually have preserved "swim traces" - scratches made on riverbeds and lake floors by the clawed toes of predator dinosaurs - that preserve direct evidence for this behaviour. Because we can work out how heavy