Is it possible that dinosaurs were not giants due to their design?

Question

Could it be that the giant dinosaurs, rather than being a species of giants, were "freaks of nature", that grew to enormous size because dinosaurs didnt have a rigid predetermined size like we do? The number of actual remains is very small when you consider how many billions of dinosaurs roamed the earth. Therefore theTyrannosaurus could actually be a raptor.

Freaks on nature doesnt mean that they were the odd one therefore there was not many of them. It means that they were not designed to be that big. In oder to know they had completely different bones you would have to be looking for that, therefore would have to have used my theory to begin with. Raptor was just one example. Sorry no prize.

Answer 1

I would question which is actually the norm - constant growth throughout life or reaching a predetermined size. Certainly if an area of the ocean is big enough and food is plentiful then a shark will not stop growing.

There is certainly a great deal of debate over whether Nanotyrannus (a Tyrannosaur 60% the size of T. rex) is a juvenile Tyrannosaurus or not. We only have 30 decent specimens of Tyrannosaurus, and a further 26 fragmentary specimens which are attributed to T. rex. With that sampling, it would be hard to tell exactly what the complete growth series of a Tyrannosaurus would be, especially since there seems to be a difference of the sexes which affects the stockiness of their build, which may yet turn out to be growth related or even an indication of separate species.

What we do know, from closely studying cross sections of rib bones from Sue and other Tyrannosaurids, is that they have a teenage growth spurt, reaching almost full size within 4 years, before growth starts to slow down to almost negligible.

Now I don't know what the situation is with growth rates in the real giants, the Sauropods, but I think it's safe to say that Tyrannosaurus at least grows more toward a determined size than an ever-growing constant.

Answer 2

There are as many fossils of large dinosaurs as there are smaller ones. If they were "freaks of nature", then there were relatively a lot of them. Also, the bone structure was not the same, although they were similar in general appearance. Orang Utans and Chimpanzees look similar in a general sense (apart from colour), but their different bone structure would be identifiable.
The T-rex filled a predator niche for larger prey, the velociraptors ate the smaller stuff.

Edit: There have been dinosaur babies found, that have been identified as such, because they have the same structure as larger dinosaurs. They would know they have different structure because they know what they are looking at, they would not ignore similar bone structures just because they were different sizes. My comment about the relative frequency of larger dinosaurs is still valid. To simplify - if 50% of dinosaur fossils are very large, and 50% are small, irrespective of the species, then that suggests that there was a normal population of dinosaurs of that size. They were not freaks, they were quite common at that size. The fossil records suggest that dinosaurs species varied in size normally from chicken-sized, up to house-sized, and the bone structure suggests that the within species variation was not that great.

Answer 3

If you are saying it was possible that one dinosaur existed and evolution twisted it, then yes, I suppose that could be.