Valley of the T. rex is a Discovery Channel documentary, featuring paleontologist Jack Horner, that aired on September 10, 2001. The documentary posits T. rex was purely a scavenger rather then a hunter. Despite being famous for being the first dinosaur documentary with Saurornitholestes, this, alongside later series Jurassic Fight Club, Monsters Resurrected and the more recent Dinosaur with Stephen Fry, has been widely criticized for a bevy of inaccuracies it presents (see below).
Plot[]
Jack Horner leads a team of paleontologists out into the American Badlands, both making new discoveries and explaining his argument for Tyrannosaurus being a scavenger.
About the program[]
For most of the documentary, a modified version of When Dinosaurs Roamed America's Tyrannosaurus model is used. Throughout the film, Jack Horner makes corrections to this model to fit his Scavenger Theory. The final result is a bulky tyrannosaur with a black body and a red, scarred face resembling a vulture. Valley of the T-Rex is intertwined with footage of paleontologists in the field making new discoveries about Tyrannosaurus.
Animals featured[]
- Quetzalcoatlus
- Edmontosaurus
- Tyrannosaurus rex
- Saurornitholestes
- Triceratops
- Ornithomimus (unidentified, uses stock footage from When Dinosaurs Roamed America)
Scientific Inaccuracies or Speculation[]
- Unedited bear sounds are used to make the Tyrannosaurus vocalizations. While dinosaurs likely could vocalize well, there is no proof to show they were capable of roaring like large mammalian predators. This sound effect could have possibly been done due to budget constraints not allowing for a unique noise.
- Saurornitholestes is depicted as a pack-hunting animal, gathering to take down a fully grown Edmontosaurus. While still potentially possible, coordinated pack hunting is very speculative behavior especially in such a small animal against one of the largest genera of hadrosaurid.
- Additionally, Saurornitholestes is depicted as being in Montana when its fossils are actually only found in Alberta, Canada, and it lived long before the extinction of the dinosaurs.
- Jack Horner takes the slow-running legs and short arms of Tyrannosaurus and uses those as evidence for his argument, but Tyrannosaurus didn't need fast running legs or longer arms to grab prey, and likely relied on ambushing its slower prey. As for the arms being proof of a transition to a scavenger-based diet, this isn't the case either as most large theropods had significantly reduced forelimbs due to their focus of killing prey with the mouth instead of claws.
- The Tyrannosaurus' body is far too wide, and the gait is unnatural for an animal, being very stiff (though this may be due to animating budget constraints).
- All carnivorous animals scavenge, and all carnivorous animals (besides some insects) also hunt. Even vultures, which the documentary likes to make a reference to, hunt at least partially. Therefore it is impossible that Tyrannosaurus purely scavenged and more likely that it would hunt more often than survive off of carrion alone given its size.
- There are examples in real life of healed bite wounds on herbivorous dinosaur specimens (like Triceratops, whose wounds are misattributed to Saurornitholestes, as seen in the documentary) that came from Tyrannosaurus itself instead of smaller hunters like Saurornitholestes, showing clearly that the wound wasn't caused via being "scavenged" by the former, but rather proof the animals were attacked by large predators and later healed from the wound. This suggests attempted hunts, which the documentary ignores in favor of a purely detritivorous lifestyle to coincide with Horner's theory.
- Horner states that Tyrannosaurus had a poor sense of eyesight. This is highly unlikely, as most theropods, including birds, would have had incredible vision, both in quality and color.
- Horner also makes a comparison with the teeth of Tyrannosaurus to a Hyena, both being used to crush bones when eating. Not only do Hyenas often hunt their prey, but they use that same method to kill it.