I'm guessing the Isle of Dread -- which is crazy big, once you start counting hexes -- could probably handle one pack of T. Rexes. Still, that would be enough. I imagine their territory would be picked clean pretty quickly, requiring them to move in search of new prey periodically. The human tribes would likely have the migration timeline down to a near-science, as it would make hunting beyond the wall untenable while the pack was in the area.
That article is absurd. Scientists have been suggesting that, based on the exact same evidence from albertosaurs in the Dinosaur Provincial Park and large carnosaurs like Mapusaurus in Argentina for the better part of fifty years now. For the journalist to say that this discovery challenges long-held beliefs is flat out wrong. What it does is offer slight circumstantial evidence to support long-held beliefs, which are the exact opposite of what the journalist is saying that they are. And although that's been suggested, it certainly hasn't been
proved; crocodiles hang out together and would fossilize in gangs or mobs similar to this as well if there was a sudden flash flood or ashfall that killed them together, but that hardly means that crocodiles are pack hunters. The jury is still very much out on whether or not tyrannosaurs and other large dinosaurian carnivores hunted in packs or not. But it's a new idea? C'mon. It was an
old idea already when Nigel Marvin dramatized it in the mainstream BBC documentary
Chased by Dinosaurs in 2002 for Giganotosaurus, and again specifically for T. rex in
Prehistoric Park in 2006. I can understand why someone may not be familiar with those big, mainstream, docudramas if you're not a dinosaur fan, I guess, but how does a journalist say that a mainstream opinion that hasn't been current for
decades is still the mainstream opinion. I mean, fer cryin' out loud, Bob Bakker's popular book
Dinosaur Heresies suggested it in 1986, and that book was criticized by dinosaur scientists for doing the same thing for dramatic effect; pretending that these ideas that had started toppling during the late 60s and 70s were still current mainstream ideas about dinosaur behavior and biology when they weren't any more. Greg Paul's popular book
Predatory Dinosaurs of the World basically made the assumption that it was a given that large predatory dinosaurs hunted in packs, and that book was written in 1988 and was cited as a major influence on Michael Crichton's own Jurassic Park novel. It's a perfect example, speaking of Michael Crichton, of why he coined the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. "Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the 'wet streets cause rain' stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know. That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn't. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.”
A few other points:
1) The Iberian peninsula during the late Jurassic was an island. It still had almost the exact same fauna as the Jurassic Morrison of Utah, Colorado and Wyoming where all of the big famous sauropods were from. The Lancian fauna (and for that matter, the slightly earlier Judithan and Edmontonian fanuas) were all found on a relatively narrow strip between the Rockies and the Niobrara Sea. I think there's a lot of overestimating how much space is needed in this thread. Real-life evidence, such as it is, suggests that large dinosaurs lived in relatively small ranges.
2) Hell Creek and the earlier ages were much like the Gulf Coast states. Think Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi and panhandle Florida—maybe the coasts of Georgia, South Carolina, etc. but with more primitive plants. Floodplains weren't prairie; the expectation is that these territories were heavily wooded and somewhat warm temperate. Jungle isn't an inappropriate description, although hardwood marshy forests is probably better. Of course T. rex also lived in the southern region, which was ecologically quite different. But curiously, T. rex is the only one who did so. Other, slightly earlier tyrannosaurs, like the albertosaurs and daspletosaurs, or even Tetraphoneus mentioned in the article, were usually confined to
either the northern or southern province with its differing ecology, not both.
3) T. rexes weren't at all closely related to elephants. What they were more closely related to is large birds. There are no featherless large birds, no matter how tropical the environment that they lived in, as far as we know. Moas and elephant birds weren't featherless. Ostriches aren't featherless. Nobody is suggesting that phorusrachids or gastornids were featherless, even though some of them (particularly the latter) lived in even hotter times than the Cretaceous. In fact, we may even have a Gastornis feather impression from the Green River formation. T. rex's ancestors were certainly feathered, like Yutyrannus, which was a pretty sizeable animal itself; maybe not as massive as an elephant, but more massive than most rhinos, and Yutyrannus was certainly feathered. Of course, to be fair, the climate was probably a bit more temperate where Yutyrannus lived, and they may have had pretty frosty weather in the winter. But it's not a binary case of "T. rex had to live at the poles, otherwise it wouldn't have needed or had feathers" which seems a bit close to what's being proposed here. By the way, we also know other large dinosaurs, even in very tropical climates, were feathered, like big oviraptors and therizinosaurs.
Anyway, all of that presupposes that you want "accurate" dinosaurs in your D&D, which is hardly a given.
