What did T. rex drink?
Water. There was nothing else to drink then and there is nothing else now — and the water on Earth then is the water on Earth today, because it has nowhere to go. The more interesting question is how we know T. rex was there at all, and the answer near Denver is: 5 separate finds, the closest 8.2 km from the middle of the city.
Dug up on the edge of a city
These are the tyrannosaur records the Paleobiology Database holds within about 20 km of central Denver. Each one is a real place someone dug, and the distance is from the city centre — near Denver, never underneath it.
- Tyrannosauridae (family)8.2 km away · Little Dry Creek · Denver · 72.2–66 million years ago
- Tyrannosaurus rex (species)11.5 km away · Oak Place, Westminster (DMNH Loc. 1513) · Denver · 72.2–66 million years ago
- Tyrannosauridae (family)11.5 km away · Oak Place, Westminster (DMNH Loc. 1513) · Denver · 72.2–66 million years ago
- Tyrannosaurus rex (species)14.2 km away · Littleton (DMNH Loc. 612) · Denver · 72.2–66 million years ago
- Tyrannosaurus rex (species)17.6 km away · south shores, Standley Lake (UCM) · Denver · 72.2–66 million years ago
- Tyrannosaurus rex (species)17.6 km away · Promontory Pointe (DMNH Loc. 1927) · Denver · 72.2–66 million years ago
- Tyrannosaurus rex (species)18.3 km away · southwest end, South Table Mountain · Denver · 72.2–66 million years ago
- Tyrannosaurus (genus)18.3 km away · southwest end, South Table Mountain · Denver · 72.2–66 million years ago
Standley Lake, Littleton, Westminster. People walk dogs there. Read what else the ground under that city holds on the Denver page.
There are only 70 T. rex in the whole database
For the most famous animal that has ever lived, that is a startlingly small number. Every T. rex you have seen in a film, a book or a museum traces back to about 70 recorded finds worldwide — and 5 of them are within twenty kilometres of one American city.
The database puts them between about 83.6 and 66 million years ago. The younger end is the end of the Cretaceous — T. rex was still walking around when it happened.
What this page will not tell you
How much a T. rex drank in a day. How often. Whether it drank from a river, a lake or a puddle after rain. How long one lived. What it weighed.
None of that is in the sources this site uses, and all of it is the obvious next sentence — which is exactly why it is not here. A fossil record tells you that an animal existed, roughly when, and where somebody found it. Everything else is somebody else’s research, and if we cannot point you at it, we do not say it.
What we can point at is the water. Whether some of what is in your glass has been through a dinosaur is a question about numbers, and the numbers are worked through on the dinosaur water page.
Where this comes from
- The fossils
- Paleobiology Database, data service version data1.2, read . Licence: Creative Commons CC0. The worldwide T. rex count and its age range come from the same database, quoted with their queries on the dinosaur water page.
- How sure is this?
- Fossil ages are reconstructed from the rock a specimen was found in, so they are estimates with a range rather than exact dates — that is why every entry above shows two numbers. Distances are to the place the fossil was dug up, rounded, and never imply the animal lived at that exact spot.