Dino people, I am abusing my blogging power to ask a critical question. The image below is a reconstruction of Sue, the T-Rex skeleton at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. This replica is considered to be accurate based on what we know thus far.
My question is this: How do we know this is the correct size of her eyes? Is it based on the size of her skull or something else?
They can see how big the eye sockets are from the skull. Also, most dinosaurs had bones called scleral rings, which are bones inside the eyeball. I don't know if we have any examples of T. rex that preserved them, but we do have other therapods.
(The info page is by @alithographica )
I'm reblogging again to add that this means that we know how big their pupils are, since the hole in the scleral ring is only a little bigger than the pupil.
It's also how we know that most dinosaurs had round pupils. It's pretty common for people to depict dinosaurs with slit pupils, probably because of Jurassic Park, mostly because it looks really cool, but nope, they were round. There are very few, if any, birds with slit pupils, which is further evidence for round pupils. And most extant animals with slit pupils are on the small side. Many people think of cats having slit pupils, and they do, but it's the little ones. Lions and tigers have round pupils, because slit pupils are most useful closest to the ground and they actually sacrifice some of their visually acuity for the sake of being better at judging distances in low-light conditions, and most animals with them are ambush predators that jump out at their prey. You ever seen a video where someone throws or bounces a ball towards a cat and it bops them on the head and they seem surprised? That's why; they struggle to track where the ball is going, especially horizontally. So for anything over a certain size, slit pupils are a detriment, especially if they chase down prey.
And yeah, if you've ever seen a scientific source say that a certain species of dinosaur hunted at night and wondered how the hell we could possibly know that, this is how. Their eyeball bones.
