Although a century ago scientists thought that the dinosaurs of the Tyrannosaurus rex species walked upright, they discarded the hypothesis several decades ago when they found that their posture was more like that of a bird, which implies that they moved with their tail raised and their head forward in front of its two muscular hind legs. However, an outdated image of this upright Jurassic dinosaur remains in the popular imagination, as shown by a study carried out by paleontologists from Cornell University in New York (USA) echoed by the Associated Press. "Children have grown up with pajamas, cookies, toys and wallpaper with tyrannosaurs drawn in an upright position, walking like a human would," explains Warren Allmon, co-author of the study published in the Journal of Geoscience Education and based on more out of 316 T. rex drawings, of which 72% represent it in the wrong position .
As the researchers conclude, this is a "cultural inertia" that educators, natural science museums that display the skeletons of these reptiles, popularizers and the creators of movies and books about dinosaurs should help correct.
