He did a lot of good work. I also feel happy knowing that we actually found the particle physically while he was still alive. That has got to be satisfying. Rest easy, Higgs. ❤️
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It is "solid evidence that tyrannosaurs drastically changed their diet as they grew up," said Dr Darla Zelenitsky, from the University of Calgary.
"We now know that these teenage [tyrannosaurs] hunted small, young dinosaurs," said Dr Zelenitsky, one of the lead scientists in this study, which is published in the journal Science Advances.
But, Dr Zelenitsky, added, "these smaller, immature tyrannosaurs were probably not ready to jump into a group of horned dinosaurs, where the adults weighed thousands of kilograms".
Staff at Alberta's Royal Tyrell Museum of Palaeontology eventually noticed small toe-bones sticking out from the ribcage.
"The rock within the ribcage was removed to expose what was hidden inside," explained Dr Therrien, who is the other lead scientist in this study.
While the adults bit and scraped with their powerful "killer banana" teeth, "this animal was selecting and even dissecting its prey - biting off the legs and swallowing them whole".
For those of you wondering how this is useful, tobacco is often used as a model organism in botany. The utility of this technique is less obvious in tobacco but more obvious in fruits, vegetables, etc. think seedless grapes, etc
Seedless grapes already exist, but I suppose you could now insert the gene into other plants/varieties to make those seedless as well.
I'm thinking more about how big ag companies could use this to prevent farmers from saving seeds/propagating a copyrighted variety (though I don't know if that's common with any crops where the seed itself isn't the end product) or maybe more charitably, preventing their copyrighted plants from cross pollinating neighboring fields of the same species (e.g. ruining that neighbor's non-gmo status).
Finally, this could be useful if it can be "switched on" i.e. by deliberately polluting an invasive plant's gene pool with this gene and then switching it on to stall the invasive's population growth. But I think most invasives are perennials, so would still need to be removed some other way.
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