英语听力：探索发现 2012-07-01 恐龙是怎样的炼成的—19

 Oh, this is a bit different. There’re dinosaurs² here. Now these guys I recognized. (Yes.) So this is your famous Thomas? (Yes.) Can we get up here? (Sure. Absolutely.) 

 

Face to face to the baby T-rex. With three T-rexes of different ages on one platform, it's possible for the first time ever to get an understanding of the entire life cycle of this legend of the dinosaur¹ kingdom. 

 

So having a series of juvenile³ skeletons like this gives you insights into the way that dinosaurs grew.

 

Absolutely. The dinosaurs had growth bursts. So this animal is estimated to have died at the age of two.

 

Right.

 

And this one here is estimated to have died at the age 13. There is, you know, there is a size discrepancy⁴ here, but they are also 11 years apart. Yet this animal is only four years older than this one. Yet it’s enormously bigger than this one. What this is telling you is that between 13 and 17, they were able to add about 1,500 pounds, that’s what 750 kilograms a year.

 

Wow. And when you see that the two skeletons close to each other like that, you really get a kind of physical impression of that.

 

Although Thomas towers over the younger T-rexes, even he wasn't fully⁵ grown. But at about 17 years old, he was already 11 meters long and over three tons in weight. 

 

So this is a juvenile, this enormous skeleton.

 

Indeed. Indeed. It’s an animal that probably died at the age of 17, so rather young.

 

So he's still a teenager. 

 

You can tell that he's a juvenile not only based on the histology on the bone tissue for which we have studies of it, but also because there are many bones that would fuse when the animal was a full-grown that have yet not been fused, one of them missed here, the calcaneum and the astragals

 

are completely unfused and both with the tibia. 

 

And it's not just the phenomenal speed at which they grew that Luis’ shedding light on. The final addition to this platform would be carcass of another dinosaur, the T-rexes' dinner. It will give us an insight into how the three T-rexes may have interacted.

1 dinosaur   

n.恐龙

参考例句：

• Are you trying to tell me that David was attacked by a dinosaur?你是想要告诉我大卫被一支恐龙所攻击？
• He stared at the faithful miniature of the dinosaur.他凝视著精确的恐龙缩小模型。

2 dinosaurs   

n.恐龙( dinosaur的名词复数 )；守旧落伍的人，过时落后的东西

参考例句：

• The brontosaurus was one of the largest of all dinosaurs. 雷龙是所有恐龙中最大的一种。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• Dinosaurs have been extinct for millions of years. 恐龙绝种已有几百万年了。 来自《简明英汉词典》

3 juvenile   

n.青少年，少年读物；adj.青少年的，幼稚的

参考例句：

• For a grown man he acted in a very juvenile manner.身为成年人，他的行为举止显得十分幼稚。
• Juvenile crime is increasing at a terrifying rate.青少年犯罪正在以惊人的速度增长。

4 discrepancy   

n.不同；不符；差异；矛盾

参考例句：

• The discrepancy in their ages seemed not to matter.他们之间年龄的差异似乎没有多大关系。
• There was a discrepancy in the two reports of the accident.关于那次事故的两则报道有不一致之处。

5 fully   

adv.完全地，全部地，彻底地；充分地

参考例句：

• The doctor asked me to breathe in,then to breathe out fully.医生让我先吸气，然后全部呼出。
• They soon became fully integrated into the local community.他们很快就完全融入了当地人的圈子。