title: Tyrannosaurus

text: The discovery of feathered dinosaurs led to debate regarding whether, and to what extent, "Tyrannosaurus" might have been feathered. Filamentous structures, which are commonly recognized as the precursors of feathers, have been reported in the small-bodied, basal tyrannosauroid "Dilong paradoxus" from the Early Cretaceous Yixian Formation of China in 2004. Because integumentary impressions of larger tyrannosauroids known at that time showed evidence of scales, the researchers who studied "Dilong" speculated that insulating feathers might have been lost by larger species due to their smaller surface-to-volume ratio. The subsequent discovery of the giant species "Yutyrannus huali", also from the Yixian, showed that even some large tyrannosauroids had feathers covering much of their bodies, casting doubt on the hypothesis that they were a size-related feature. A 2017 study reviewed known skin impressions of tyrannosaurids, including those of a "Tyrannosaurus" specimen nicknamed "Wyrex" (BHI 6230) which preserves patches of mosaic scales on the tail, hip, and neck. The study concluded that feather covering of large tyrannosaurids such as "Tyrannosaurus" was, if present, limited to the upper side of the trunk.


title: Tyrannosaurus

text: A conference abstract published in 2016 posited that theropods such as "Tyrannosaurus" had their upper teeth covered in lips, instead of bare teeth as seen in crocodilians. This was based on the presence of enamel, which according to the study needs to remain hydrated, an issue not faced by aquatic animals like crocodilians. A 2017 analytical study proposed that tyrannosaurids had large, flat scales on their snouts instead of lips. However, there has been criticism where it favors the idea for lips. Crocodiles do not really have flat scales but rather cracked keratinized skin; by observing the hummocky rugosity of tyrannosaurids, and comparing it to extant lizards they found that tyrannosaurids had squamose scales rather than a crocodillian-like skin.


title: Tyrannosaurus

text: As the number of known specimens increased, scientists began to analyze the variation between individuals and discovered what appeared to be two distinct body types, or "morphs", similar to some other theropod species. As one of these morphs was more solidly built, it was termed the 'robust' morph while the other was termed ''. Several morphological differences associated with the two morphs were used to analyze sexual dimorphism in "T. rex", with the 'robust' morph usually suggested to be female. For example, the pelvis of several 'robust' specimens seemed to be wider, perhaps to allow the passage of eggs. It was also thought that the 'robust' morphology correlated with a reduced chevron on the first tail vertebra, also ostensibly to allow eggs to pass out of the reproductive tract, as had been erroneously reported for crocodiles.


title: Tyrannosaurus

text: In recent years, evidence for sexual dimorphism has been weakened. A 2005 study reported that previous claims of sexual dimorphism in crocodile chevron anatomy were in error, casting doubt on the existence of similar dimorphism between "T. rex" sexes. A full-sized chevron was discovered on the first tail vertebra of Sue, an extremely robust individual, indicating that this feature could not be used to differentiate the two morphs anyway. As "T. rex" specimens have been found from Saskatchewan to New Mexico, differences between individuals may be indicative of geographic variation rather than sexual dimorphism. The differences could also be age-related, with 'robust' individuals being older animals.


title: Tyrannosaurus

text: Only a single "Tyrannosaurus" specimen has been conclusively shown to belong to a specific sex. Examination of B-rex demonstrated the preservation of soft tissue within several bones. Some of this tissue has been identified as a medullary tissue, a specialized tissue grown only in modern birds as a source of calcium for the production of eggshell during ovulation. As only female birds lay eggs, medullary tissue is only found naturally in females, although males are capable of producing it when injected with female reproductive hormones like estrogen. This strongly suggests that B-rex was female and that she died during ovulation. Recent research has shown that medullary tissue is never found in crocodiles, which are thought to be the closest living relatives of dinosaurs, aside from birds. The shared presence of medullary tissue in birds and theropod dinosaurs is further evidence of the close evolutionary relationship between the two.


title: Tyrannosaurus

text: Like many bipedal dinosaurs, "T. rex" was historically depicted as a 'living tripod', with the body at 45 degrees or less from the vertical and the tail dragging along the ground, similar to a kangaroo. This concept dates from Joseph Leidy's 1865 reconstruction of "Hadrosaurus", the first to depict a dinosaur in a bipedal posture. In 1915, convinced that the creature stood upright, Henry Fairfield Osborn, former president of the American Museum of Natural History, further reinforced the notion in unveiling the first complete "T. rex" skeleton arranged this way. It stood in an upright pose for 77 years, until it was dismantled in 1992.


title: Tyrannosaurus

text: By 1970, scientists realized this pose was incorrect and could not have been maintained by a living animal, as it would have resulted in the dislocation or weakening of several joints, including the hips and the articulation between the head and the spinal column. The inaccurate AMNH mount inspired similar depictions in many films and paintings (such as Rudolph Zallinger's famous mural "The Age of Reptiles" in Yale University's Peabody Museum of Natural History) until the 1990s, when films such as "Jurassic Park" introduced a more accurate posture to the general public. Modern representations in museums, art, and film show "T. rex" with its body approximately parallel to the ground with the tail extended behind the body to balance the head.


title: Tyrannosaurus

text: To sit down, "Tyrannosaurus" may have settled its weight backwards and rested its weight on a pubic boot, the wide expansion at the end of the pubis in some dinosaurs. With its weight rested on the pelvis, it may have been free to move the hindlimbs. Getting back up again might have involved some stabilization from the diminutive forelimbs. The latter known as Newman's pushup theory has been debated. Nonetheless, "Tyrannosaurus" was probably able to get up if it fell, which only would have required placing the limbs below the center of gravity, with the tail as an effective counterbalance. Healed stress fractures in the forelimbs have been put forward both as evidence that the arms cannot have been very useful and as evidence that they were indeed used and acquired wounds, like the rest of the body.


title: Tyrannosaurus

text: When "T. rex" was first discovered, the humerus was the only element of the forelimb known. For the initial mounted skeleton as seen by the public in 1915, Osborn substituted longer, three-fingered forelimbs like those of "Allosaurus". A year earlier, Lawrence Lambe described the short, two-fingered forelimbs of the closely related "Gorgosaurus". This strongly suggested that "T. rex" had similar forelimbs, but this hypothesis was not confirmed until the first complete "T. rex" forelimbs were identified in 1989, belonging to MOR 555 (the "Wankel rex"). The remains of Sue also include complete forelimbs. "T. rex" arms are very small relative to overall body size, measuring only long, and some scholars have labelled them as vestigial. However, the bones show large areas for muscle attachment, indicating considerable strength. This was recognized as early as 1906 by Osborn, who speculated that the forelimbs may have been used to grasp a mate during copulation. Newman (1970) suggested that the forelimbs were used to assist "Tyrannosaurus" in rising from a prone position. Since then, other functions have been proposed, although some scholars find them implausible. Padian (2022) argued that the reduction of the arms in tyrannosaurids did not serve a particular function but was a secondary adaptation; stating that as tyrannosaurids developed larger and more powerful skulls and jaws, the arms got smaller to avoid being bitten or torn by other individuals, particularly during group feedings.


title: Tyrannosaurus

text: Another possibility is that the forelimbs held struggling prey while it was killed by the tyrannosaur's enormous jaws. This hypothesis may be supported by biomechanical analysis. "T. rex" forelimb bones exhibit extremely thick cortical bone, which has been interpreted as evidence that they were developed to withstand heavy loads. The biceps brachii muscle of an adult "T. rex" was capable of lifting by itself; other muscles such as the brachialis would work along with the biceps to make elbow flexion even more powerful. The M. biceps muscle of "T. rex" was 3.5 times as powerful as the human equivalent. A "T. rex" forearm had a limited range of motion, with the shoulder and elbow joints allowing only 40 and 45 degrees of motion, respectively. In contrast, the same two joints in "Deinonychus" allow up to 88 and 130 degrees of motion, respectively, while a human arm can rotate 360 degrees at the shoulder and move through 165 degrees at the elbow. The heavy build of the arm bones, strength of the muscles, and limited range of motion may indicate a system evolved to hold fast despite the stresses of a struggling prey animal. In the first detailed scientific description of "Tyrannosaurus" forelimbs, paleontologists Kenneth Carpenter and Matt Smith dismissed notions that the forelimbs were useless or that "Tyrannosaurus" was an obligate scavenger.


title: Tyrannosaurus

text: The idea that the arms served as weapons when hunting prey have also been proposed by Steven M. Stanley, who suggested that the arms were used for slashing prey, especially by using the claws to rapidly inflict long, deep gashes to its prey. This was dismissed by Padian, who have argued that Stanley based his conclusion on incorrectly estimated forelimb size and range of motion.


title: Tyrannosaurus

text: "Tyrannosaurus", like most dinosaurs, was long thought to have an ectothermic ("cold-blooded") reptilian metabolism. The idea of dinosaur ectothermy was challenged by scientists like Robert T. Bakker and John Ostrom in the early years of the "Dinosaur Renaissance", beginning in the late 1960s. "T. rex" itself was claimed to have been endothermic ("warm-blooded"), implying a very active lifestyle. Since then, several paleontologists have sought to determine the ability of "Tyrannosaurus" to regulate its body temperature. Histological evidence of high growth rates in young "T. rex", comparable to those of mammals and birds, may support the hypothesis of a high metabolism. Growth curves indicate that, as in mammals and birds, "T. rex" growth was limited mostly to immature animals, rather than the indeterminate growth seen in most other vertebrates.


title: Tyrannosaurus

text: Oxygen isotope ratios in fossilized bone are sometimes used to determine the temperature at which the bone was deposited, as the ratio between certain isotopes correlates with temperature. In one specimen, the isotope ratios in bones from different parts of the body indicated a temperature difference of no more than 4 to 5 °C (7 to 9 °F) between the vertebrae of the torso and the tibia of the lower leg. This small temperature range between the body core and the extremities was claimed by paleontologist Reese Barrick and geochemist William Showers to indicate that "T. rex" maintained a constant internal body temperature (homeothermy) and that it enjoyed a metabolism somewhere between ectothermic reptiles and endothermic mammals. Other scientists have pointed out that the ratio of oxygen isotopes in the fossils today does not necessarily represent the same ratio in the distant past, and may have been altered during or after fossilization (diagenesis). Barrick and Showers have defended their conclusions in subsequent papers, finding similar results in another theropod dinosaur from a different continent and tens of millions of years earlier in time ("Giganotosaurus"). Ornithischian dinosaurs also showed evidence of homeothermy, while varanid lizards from the same formation did not. In 2022, Wiemann and colleagues used a different approach—the spectroscopy of lipoxidation signals, which are byproducts of oxidative phosphorylation and correlate with metabolic rates—to show that various dinosaur genera including "Tyrannosaurus" had endothermic metabolisms, on par with that of modern birds and higher than that of mammals. They also suggested that such a metabolism was ancestrally common to all dinosaurs.


title: Tyrannosaurus

text: Even if "T. rex" does exhibit evidence of homeothermy, it does not necessarily mean that it was endothermic. Such thermoregulation may also be explained by gigantothermy, as in some living sea turtles. Similar to contemporary crocodilians, openings (dorsotemporal fenestrae) in the skull roofs of "Tyrannosaurus" may have aided thermoregulation.


title: Tyrannosaurus

text: In the March 2005 issue of "Science", Mary Higby Schweitzer of North Carolina State University and colleagues announced the recovery of soft tissue from the marrow cavity of a fossilized leg bone from a "T. rex". The bone had been intentionally, though reluctantly, broken for shipping and then not preserved in the normal manner, specifically because Schweitzer was hoping to test it for soft tissue. Designated as the Museum of the Rockies specimen 1125, or MOR 1125, the dinosaur was previously excavated from the Hell Creek Formation. Flexible, bifurcating blood vessels and fibrous but elastic bone matrix tissue were recognized. In addition, microstructures resembling blood cells were found inside the matrix and vessels. The structures bear resemblance to ostrich blood cells and vessels. Whether an unknown process, distinct from normal fossilization, preserved the material, or the material is original, the researchers do not know, and they are careful not to make any claims about preservation. If it is found to be original material, any surviving proteins may be used as a means of indirectly guessing some of the DNA content of the dinosaurs involved, because each protein is typically created by a specific gene. The absence of previous finds may be the result of people assuming preserved tissue was impossible, therefore not looking. Since the first, two more tyrannosaurs and a hadrosaur have also been found to have such tissue-like structures. Research on some of the tissues involved has suggested that birds are closer relatives to tyrannosaurs than other modern animals.


title: Tyrannosaurus

text: In studies reported in "Science" in April 2007, Asara and colleagues concluded that seven traces of collagen proteins detected in purified "T. rex" bone most closely match those reported in chickens, followed by frogs and newts. The discovery of proteins from a creature tens of millions of years old, along with similar traces the team found in a mastodon bone at least 160,000 years old, upends the conventional view of fossils and may shift paleontologists' focus from bone hunting to biochemistry. Until these finds, most scientists presumed that fossilization replaced all living tissue with inert minerals. Paleontologist Hans Larsson of McGill University in Montreal, who was not part of the studies, called the finds "a milestone", and suggested that dinosaurs could "enter the field of molecular biology and really slingshot paleontology into the modern world".


title: Tyrannosaurus

text: The presumed soft tissue was called into question by Thomas Kaye of the University of Washington and his co-authors in 2008. They contend that what was really inside the tyrannosaur bone was slimy biofilm created by bacteria that coated the voids once occupied by blood vessels and cells. The researchers found that what previously had been identified as remnants of blood cells, because of the presence of iron, were actually framboids, microscopic mineral spheres bearing iron. They found similar spheres in a variety of other fossils from various periods, including an ammonite. In the ammonite, they found the spheres in a place where the iron they contain could not have had any relationship to the presence of blood. Schweitzer has strongly criticized Kaye's claims and argues that there is no reported evidence that biofilms can produce branching, hollow tubes like those noted in her study. San Antonio, Schweitzer and colleagues published an analysis in 2011 of what parts of the collagen had been recovered, finding that it was the inner parts of the collagen coil that had been preserved, as would have been expected from a long period of protein degradation. Other research challenges the identification of soft tissue as biofilm and confirms finding "branching, vessel-like structures" from within fossilized bone.


title: Tyrannosaurus

text: Scientists have produced a wide range of possible maximum running speeds for "Tyrannosaurus": mostly around , but as low as and as high as , though it running this speed is very unlikely. "Tyrannosaurus" was a bulky and heavy carnivore so it is unlikely to run very fast at all compared to other theropods like "Carnotaurus" or "Giganotosaurus". Researchers have relied on various estimating techniques because, while there are many tracks of large theropods walking, none showed evidence of running.


title: Tyrannosaurus

text: A 2002 report used a mathematical model (validated by applying it to three living animals: alligators, chickens, and humans; and eight more species, including emus and ostriches) to gauge the leg muscle mass needed for fast running (over ). Scientists who think that "Tyrannosaurus" was able to run point out that hollow bones and other features that would have lightened its body may have kept adult weight to a mere or so, or that other animals like ostriches and horses with long, flexible legs are able to achieve high speeds through slower but longer strides. Proposed top speeds exceeded for "Tyrannosaurus", but were deemed infeasible because they would require exceptional leg muscles of approximately 40–86% of total body mass. Even moderately fast speeds would have required large leg muscles. If the muscle mass was less, only for walking or jogging would have been possible. Holtz noted that tyrannosaurids and some closely related groups had significantly longer distal hindlimb components (shin plus foot plus toes) relative to the femur length than most other theropods, and that tyrannosaurids and their close relatives had a tightly interlocked metatarsus (foot bones). The third metatarsal was squeezed between the second and fourth metatarsals to form a single unit called an arctometatarsus. This ankle feature may have helped the animal to run more efficiently. Together, these leg features allowed "Tyrannosaurus" to transmit locomotory forces from the foot to the lower leg more effectively than in earlier theropods.


title: Tyrannosaurus

text: Additionally, a 2020 study indicates that "Tyrannosaurus" and other tyrannosaurids were exceptionally efficient walkers. Studies by Dececchi "et al.", compared the leg proportions, body mass, and the gaits of more than 70 species of theropod dinosaurs including "Tyrannosaurus" and its relatives. The research team then applied a variety of methods to estimate each dinosaur's top speed when running as well as how much energy each dinosaur expended while moving at more relaxed speeds such as when walking. Among smaller to medium-sized species such as dromaeosaurids, longer legs appear to be an adaptation for faster running, in line with previous results by other researchers. But for theropods weighing over , top running speed is limited by body size, so longer legs instead were found to have correlated with low-energy walking. The results further indicate that smaller theropods evolved long legs as a means to both aid in hunting and escape from larger predators while larger theropods that evolved long legs did so to reduce the energy costs and increase foraging efficiency, as they were freed from the demands of predation pressure due to their role as apex predators. Compared to more basal groups of theropods in the study, tyrannosaurs like "Tyrannosaurus" itself showed a marked increase in foraging efficiency due to reduced energy expenditures during hunting or scavenging. This in turn likely resulted in tyrannosaurs having a reduced need for hunting forays and requiring less food to sustain themselves as a result. Additionally, the research, in conjunction with studies that show tyrannosaurs were more agile than other large-bodied theropods, indicates they were quite well-adapted to a long-distance stalking approach followed by a quick burst of speed to go for the kill. Analogies can be noted between tyrannosaurids and modern wolves as a result, supported by evidence that at least some tyrannosaurids were hunting in group settings.


title: Tyrannosaurus

text: A study published in 2021 by Pasha van Bijlert "et al.", calculated the preferred walking speed of "Tyrannosaurus", reporting a speed of . While walking, animals reduce their energy expenditure by choosing certain step rhythms at which their body parts resonate. The same would have been true for dinosaurs, but previous studies did not fully account for the impact the tail had on their walking speeds. According to the authors, when a dinosaur walked, its tail would slightly sway up and down with each step as a result of the interspinous ligaments suspending the tail. Like rubber bands, these ligaments stored energy when they are stretched due to the swaying of the tail. Using a 3-D model of "Tyrannosaurus" specimen Trix, muscles and ligaments were reconstructed to simulate the tail movements. This results in a rhythmic, energy-efficient walking speed for "Tyrannosaurus" similar to that seen in living animals such as humans, ostriches and giraffes.


title: Tyrannosaurus

text: A 2017 study estimated the top running speed of "Tyrannosaurus" as 17 mph (27 km/h), speculating that "Tyrannosaurus" exhausted its energy reserves long before reaching top speed, resulting in a parabola-like relationship between size and speed. Another 2017 study hypothesized that an adult "Tyrannosaurus" was incapable of running due to high skeletal loads. Using a calculated weight estimate of 7 tons, the model showed that speeds above 11 mph (18 km/h) would have probably shattered the leg bones of "Tyrannosaurus". The finding may mean that running was also not possible for other giant theropod dinosaurs like "Giganotosaurus", "Mapusaurus" and "Acrocanthosaurus".


title: Tyrannosaurus

text: However, studies by Eric Snively and colleagues"," published in 2019 indicate that "Tyrannosaurus" and other tyrannosaurids were more maneuverable than allosauroids and other theropods of comparable size due to low rotational inertia compared to their body mass combined with large leg muscles. As a result, it is hypothesized that "Tyrannosaurus" was capable of making relatively quick turns and could likely pivot its body more quickly when close to its prey, or that while turning, the theropod could "pirouette" on a single planted foot while the alternating leg was held out in a suspended swing during a pursuit. The results of this study potentially could shed light on how agility could have contributed to the success of tyrannosaurid evolution.


title: Tyrannosaurus

text: Rare fossil footprints and trackways found in New Mexico and Wyoming that are assigned to the ichnogenus "Tyrannosauripus" have been attributed to being made by "Tyrannosaurus", based on the stratigraphic age of the rocks they are preserved in. The first specimen, found in 1994 was described by Lockley and Hunt and consists of a single, large footprint. Another pair of ichnofossils, described in 2021, show a large tyrannosaurid rising from a prone position by rising up using its elbows in conjunction with the pads on their feet to stand. These two unique sets of fossils were found in Ludlow, Colorado and Cimarron, New Mexico. Another ichnofossil described in 2018, perhaps belonging to a juvenile "Tyrannosaurus" or the dubious genus "Nanotyrannus" was uncovered in the Lance Formation of Wyoming. The trackway itself offers a rare glimpse into the walking speed of tyrannosaurids, and the trackmaker is estimated to have been moving at a speed of , significantly faster than previously assumed for estimations of walking speed in tyrannosaurids.


title: Tyrannosaurus

text: A study conducted by Lawrence Witmer and Ryan Ridgely of Ohio University found that "Tyrannosaurus" shared the heightened sensory abilities of other coelurosaurs, highlighting relatively rapid and coordinated eye and head movements; an enhanced ability to sense low frequency sounds, which would allow tyrannosaurs to track prey movements from long distances; and an enhanced sense of smell. A study published by Kent Stevens concluded that "Tyrannosaurus" had keen vision. By applying modified perimetry to facial reconstructions of several dinosaurs including "Tyrannosaurus", the study found that "Tyrannosaurus" had a binocular range of 55 degrees, surpassing that of modern hawks. Stevens estimated that "Tyrannosaurus" had 13 times the visual acuity of a human and surpassed the visual acuity of an eagle, which is 3.6 times that of a person. Stevens estimated a limiting far point (that is, the distance at which an object can be seen as separate from the horizon) as far as away, which is greater than the that a human can see.


title: Tyrannosaurus

text: Thomas Holtz Jr. would note that high depth perception of "Tyrannosaurus" may have been due to the prey it had to hunt, noting that it had to hunt horned dinosaurs such as "Triceratops", armored dinosaurs such as "Ankylosaurus", and the duck-billed dinosaurs and their possibly complex social behaviors. He would suggest that this made precision more crucial for "Tyrannosaurus" enabling it to, "get in, get that blow in and take it down." In contrast, "Acrocanthosaurus" had limited depth perception because they hunted large sauropods, which were relatively rare during the time of "Tyrannosaurus".


title: Tyrannosaurus

text: "Tyrannosaurus" had very large olfactory bulbs and olfactory nerves relative to their brain size, the organs responsible for a heightened sense of smell. This suggests that the sense of smell was highly developed, and implies that tyrannosaurs could detect carcasses by scent alone across great distances. The sense of smell in tyrannosaurs may have been comparable to modern vultures, which use scent to track carcasses for scavenging. Research on the olfactory bulbs has shown that "T. rex" had the most highly developed sense of smell of 21 sampled non-avian dinosaur species.


title: Tyrannosaurus

text: Somewhat unusually among theropods, "T. rex" had a very long cochlea. The length of the cochlea is often related to hearing acuity, or at least the importance of hearing in behavior, implying that hearing was a particularly important sense to tyrannosaurs. Specifically, data suggests that "T. rex" heard best in the low-frequency range, and that low-frequency sounds were an important part of tyrannosaur behavior. A 2017 study by Thomas Carr and colleagues found that the snout of tyrannosaurids was highly sensitive, based on a high number of small openings in the facial bones of the related "Daspletosaurus" that contained sensory neurons. The study speculated that tyrannosaurs might have used their sensitive snouts to measure the temperature of their nests and to gently pick up eggs and hatchlings, as seen in modern crocodylians.


title: Tyrannosaurus

text: Another study published in 2021 further suggests that "Tyrannosaurus" had an acute sense of touch, based on neurovascular canals in the front of its jaws, which it could utilize to better detect and consume prey. The study, published by Kawabe and Hittori "et al.," suggests that "Tyrannosaurus" could also accurately sense slight differences in material and movement, allowing it to utilize different feeding strategies on different parts of its prey's carcasses depending on the situation. The sensitive neurovascular canals of "Tyrannosaurus" also likely were adapted to performing fine movements and behaviors such as nest building, parental care, and other social behavior such as intraspecific communication. The results of this study also align with results made in studying the related tyrannosaurid "Daspletosaurus horneri" and the allosauroid "Neovenator", which have similar neurovascular adaptations, suggesting that the faces of theropods were highly sensitive to pressure and touch. However, a more recent study reviewing the evolution of the trigeminal canals among sauropsids notes that a much denser network of neurovascular canals in the snout and lower jaw is more commonly encountered in aquatic or semiaquatic taxa (e.g., "Spinosaurus", "Halszkaraptor", "Plesiosaurus"), and taxa that developed a rhamphotheca (e.g., "Caenagnathasia"), while the network of canals in "Tyrannosaurus" appears simpler, though still more derived than in most ornithischians, and overall


title: Tyrannosaurus

text: terrestrial taxa such as tyrannosaurids and "Neovenator" may have had average facial sensitivity for non-edentulous terrestrial theropods, although further research is needed. The neurovascular canals in "Tyrannosaurus" may instead have supported soft tissue structures for thermoregulation or social signaling, the latter of which could be confirmed by the fact that the neurovascular network of canals may have changed during ontogeny.


title: Tyrannosaurus

text: A study by Grant R. Hurlburt, Ryan C. Ridgely and Lawrence Witmer obtained estimates for Encephalization Quotients (EQs), based on reptiles and birds, as well as estimates for the ratio of cerebrum to brain mass. The study concluded that "Tyrannosaurus" had the relatively largest brain of all adult non-avian dinosaurs with the exception of certain small maniraptoriforms ("Bambiraptor", "Troodon" and "Ornithomimus"). The study found that "Tyrannosaurus"'s relative brain size was still within the range of modern reptiles, being at most 2 standard deviations above the mean of non-avian reptile EQs. The estimates for the ratio of cerebrum mass to brain mass would range from 47.5 to 49.53 percent. According to the study, this is more than the lowest estimates for extant birds (44.6 percent), but still close to the typical ratios of the smallest sexually mature alligators which range from 45.9–47.9 percent. Other studies, such as those by Steve Brusatte, indicate the encephalization quotient of "Tyrannosaurus" was similar in range (2.0–2.4) to a chimpanzee (2.2–2.5), though this may be debatable as reptilian and mammalian encephalization quotients are not equivalent.


title: Tyrannosaurus

text: Philip J. Currie suggested that Tyrannosaurus may have been pack hunters, comparing "T. rex" to related species "Tarbosaurus bataar" and "Albertosaurus sarcophagus", citing fossil evidence that may indicate gregarious (describing animals that travel in herds or packs) behavior. A find in South Dakota where three "T. rex" skeletons were in close proximity may suggest the formation of a pack. Cooperative pack hunting may have been an effective strategy for subduing prey with advanced anti-predator adaptations which pose potential lethality such as "Triceratops" and "Ankylosaurus".


title: Tyrannosaurus

text: Currie's pack-hunting "T. rex" hypothesis has been criticized for not having been peer-reviewed, but rather was discussed in a television interview and book called "Dino Gangs". The Currie theory for pack hunting by "T. rex" is based mainly by analogy to a different species, "Tarbosaurus bataar". Evidence of gregariousness in "T. bataar" itself has not been peer-reviewed, and to Currie's own admission, can only be interpreted with reference to evidence in other closely related species. According to Currie gregariousness in "Albertosaurus sarcophagus" is supported by the discovery of 26 individuals with varied ages in the Dry Island bonebed. He ruled out the possibility of a predator trap due to the similar preservation state of individuals and the near absence of herbivores.


title: Tyrannosaurus

text: Additional support of Tyrannosaurid gregariousness can be found in fossilized trackways from the Upper Cretaceous Wapiti Formation of northeastern British Columbia, Canada, left by three tyrannosaurids traveling in the same direction. According to scientists assessing the Dino Gangs program, the evidence for pack hunting in "Tarbosaurus" and "Albertosaurus" is weak and based on group skeletal remains for which alternate explanations may apply (such as drought or a flood forcing dinosaurs to die together in one place). Others researchers have speculated that instead of large theropod social groups, some of these finds represent behavior more akin to Komodo dragon-like mobbing of carcasses, even going as far as to say true pack-hunting behavior may not exist in any non-avian dinosaurs due to its rarity in modern predators.


title: Tyrannosaurus

text: Evidence of intraspecific attack was found by Joseph Peterson and his colleagues in the juvenile "Tyrannosaurus" nicknamed Jane. Peterson and his team found that Jane's skull showed healed puncture wounds on the upper jaw and snout which they believe came from another juvenile "Tyrannosaurus". Subsequent CT scans of Jane's skull would further confirm the team's hypothesis, showing that the puncture wounds came from a traumatic injury and that there was subsequent healing. The team would also state that Jane's injuries were structurally different from the parasite-induced lesions found in Sue and that Jane's injuries were on her face whereas the parasite that infected Sue caused lesions to the lower jaw.


title: Tyrannosaurus

text: Most paleontologists accept that "Tyrannosaurus" was both an active predator and a scavenger like most large carnivores. By far the largest carnivore in its environment, "T. rex" was most likely an apex predator, preying upon hadrosaurs, armored herbivores like ceratopsians and ankylosaurs, and possibly sauropods. A study in 2012 by Karl Bates and Peter Falkingham found that "Tyrannosaurus" had the most powerful bite of any terrestrial animal that has ever lived, finding an adult "Tyrannosaurus" could have exerted 35,000 to 57,000 N (7,868 to 12,814 lbf) of force in the back teeth. Even higher estimates were made by Mason B. Meers in 2003. This allowed it to crush bones during repetitive biting and fully consume the carcasses of large dinosaurs. Stephan Lautenschlager and colleagues calculated that "Tyrannosaurus" was capable of a maximum jaw gape of around 80 degrees, a necessary adaptation for a wide range of jaw angles to power the creature's strong bite.


title: Tyrannosaurus

text: A debate exists, however, about whether "Tyrannosaurus" was primarily a predator or a pure scavenger. The debate originated in a 1917 study by Lambe which argued that large theropods were pure scavengers because "Gorgosaurus" teeth showed hardly any wear. This argument disregarded the fact that theropods replaced their teeth quite rapidly. Ever since the first discovery of "Tyrannosaurus" most scientists have speculated that it was a predator; like modern large predators it would readily scavenge or steal another predator's kill if it had the opportunity.


title: Tyrannosaurus

text: Paleontologist Jack Horner has been a major proponent of the view that "Tyrannosaurus" was not a predator at all but instead was exclusively a scavenger. He has put forward arguments in the popular literature to support the pure scavenger hypothesis:


title: Tyrannosaurus

text: Other evidence suggests hunting behavior in "Tyrannosaurus". The eye sockets of tyrannosaurs are positioned so that the eyes would point forward, giving them binocular vision slightly better than that of modern hawks. It is not obvious why natural selection would have favored this long-term trend if tyrannosaurs had been pure scavengers, which would not have needed the advanced depth perception that stereoscopic vision provides. In modern animals, binocular vision is found mainly in predators.


title: Tyrannosaurus

text: A 2021 study focused on the vision and hearing of the small theropod "Shuvuuia", to which "Tyrannosaurus" was compared suggests that "Tyrannosaurus" was diurnal and would have hunted predominantly during daylight hours, a feature it shared with "Dromaeosaurus", a third dinosaur compared to "Shuvuuia" in the study.


title: Tyrannosaurus

text: A skeleton of the hadrosaurid "Edmontosaurus annectens" has been described from Montana with healed tyrannosaur-inflicted damage on its tail vertebrae. The fact that the damage seems to have healed suggests that the "Edmontosaurus" survived a tyrannosaur's attack on a living target, i.e. the tyrannosaur had attempted active predation. Despite the consensus that the tail bites were caused by "Tyrannosaurus", there has been some evidence to show that they might have been created by other factors. For example, a 2014 study suggested that the tail injuries might have been due to "Edmontosaurus" individuals stepping on each other, while another study in 2020 backs up the hypothesis that biomechanical stress is the cause for the tail injuries. There is also evidence for an aggressive interaction between a "Triceratops" and a "Tyrannosaurus" in the form of partially healed tyrannosaur tooth marks on a "Triceratops" brow horn and squamosal (a bone of the neck frill); the bitten horn is also broken, with new bone growth after the break. It is not known what the exact nature of the interaction was, though: either animal could have been the aggressor. Since the "Triceratops" wounds healed, it is most likely that the "Triceratops" survived the encounter and managed to overcome the "Tyrannosaurus". In a battle against a bull "Triceratops", the "Triceratops" would likely defend itself by inflicting fatal wounds to the "Tyrannosaurus" using its sharp horns. Studies of Sue found a broken and healed fibula and tail vertebrae, scarred facial bones and a tooth from another "Tyrannosaurus" embedded in a neck vertebra, providing evidence for aggressive behavior. Studies on hadrosaur vertebrae from the Hell Creek Formation that were punctured by the teeth of what appears to be a late-stage juvenile "Tyrannosaurus" indicate that despite lacking the bone-crushing adaptations of the adults, young individuals were still capable of using the same bone-puncturing feeding technique as their adult counterparts.


title: Tyrannosaurus

text: "Tyrannosaurus" may have had infectious saliva used to kill its prey, as proposed by William Abler in 1992. Abler observed that the (tiny protuberances) on the cutting edges of the teeth are closely spaced, enclosing little chambers. These chambers might have trapped pieces of carcass with bacteria, giving "Tyrannosaurus" a deadly, infectious bite much like the Komodo dragon was thought to have. Jack Horner and Don Lessem, in a 1993 popular book, questioned Abler's hypothesis, arguing that "Tyrannosaurus"s tooth serrations as more like cubes in shape than the serrations on a Komodo monitor's teeth, which are rounded.


title: Tyrannosaurus

text: "Tyrannosaurus", and most other theropods, probably primarily processed carcasses with lateral shakes of the head, like crocodilians. The head was not as maneuverable as the skulls of allosauroids, due to flat joints of the neck vertebrae.


title: Tyrannosaurus

text: Evidence also strongly suggests that tyrannosaurs were at least occasionally cannibalistic. "Tyrannosaurus" itself has strong evidence pointing towards it having been cannibalistic in at least a scavenging capacity based on tooth marks on the foot bones, humerus, and metatarsals of one specimen. Fossils from the Fruitland Formation, Kirtland Formation (both Campanian in age) and the Maastrichtian aged Ojo Alamo Formation suggest that cannibalism was present in various tyrannosaurid genera of the San Juan Basin. The evidence gathered from the specimens suggests opportunistic feeding behavior in tyrannosaurids that cannibalized members of their own species. A study from Currie, Horner, Erickson and Longrich in 2010 has been put forward as evidence of cannibalism in the genus "Tyrannosaurus". They studied some "Tyrannosaurus" specimens with tooth marks in the bones, attributable to the same genus. The tooth marks were identified in the humerus, foot bones and metatarsals, and this was seen as evidence for opportunistic scavenging, rather than wounds caused by intraspecific combat. In a fight, they proposed it would be difficult to reach down to bite in the feet of a rival, making it more likely that the bitemarks were made in a carcass. As the bitemarks were made in body parts with relatively scantly amounts of flesh, it is suggested that the "Tyrannosaurus" was feeding on a cadaver in which the more fleshy parts already had been consumed. They were also open to the possibility that other tyrannosaurids practiced cannibalism.


title: Tyrannosaurus

text: While there is no direct evidence of "Tyrannosaurus" raising their young (the rarity of juvenile and nest Tyrannosaur fossils has left researchers guessing), it has been suggested by some that like its closest living relatives, modern archosaurs (birds and crocodiles) "Tyrannosaurus" may have protected and fed its young. Crocodilians and birds are often suggested by some paleontologists to be modern analogues for dinosaur parenting. Direct evidence of parental behavior exists in other dinosaurs such as "Maiasaura peeblesorum", the first dinosaur to have been discovered to raise its young, as well as more closely related Oviraptorids, the latter suggesting parental behavior in theropods.


title: Tyrannosaurus

text: In 2001, Bruce Rothschild and others published a study examining evidence for stress fractures and tendon avulsions in theropod dinosaurs and the implications for their behavior. Since stress fractures are caused by repeated trauma rather than singular events they are more likely to be caused by regular behavior than other types of injuries. Of the 81 "Tyrannosaurus" foot bones examined in the study, one was found to have a stress fracture, while none of the 10 hand bones were found to have stress fractures. The researchers found tendon avulsions only among "Tyrannosaurus" and "Allosaurus". An avulsion injury left a divot on the humerus of Sue the "T. rex", apparently located at the origin of the deltoid or teres major muscles. The presence of avulsion injuries being limited to the forelimb and shoulder in both "Tyrannosaurus" and "Allosaurus" suggests that theropods may have had a musculature more complex than and functionally different from those of birds. The researchers concluded that Sue's tendon avulsion was probably obtained from struggling prey. The presence of stress fractures and tendon avulsions, in general, provides evidence for a "very active" predation-based diet rather than obligate scavenging.


title: Tyrannosaurus

text: A 2009 study showed that smooth-edged holes in the skulls of several specimens might have been caused by "Trichomonas"-like parasites that commonly infect birds. According to the study, seriously infected individuals, including "Sue" and MOR 980 ("Peck's Rex"), might therefore have died from starvation after feeding became increasingly difficult. Previously, these holes had been explained by the bacterious bone infection Actinomycosis or by intraspecific attacks. A subsequent study found that while trichomoniasis has many attributes of the model proposed (osteolytic, intra oral) several features make the assumption that it was the cause of death less supportable by evidence. For example, the observed sharp margins with little reactive bone shown by the radiographs of "Trichomonas"-infected birds are dissimilar to the reactive bone seen in the affected "T. rex" specimens. Also, trichomoniasis can be very rapidly fatal in birds (14 days or less) albeit in its milder form, and this suggests that if a "Trichomonas"-like protozoan is the culprit, trichomoniasis was less acute in its non-avian dinosaur form during the Late Cretaceous. Finally, the relative size of this type of lesions is much larger in small bird throats, and may not have been enough to choke a "T. rex". A more recent study examining the pathologies concluded that the osseous alteration observed most closely resembles those around healing human cranial trepanations and healing fractures in the Triassic reptile "Stagonolepis," in the absence of infection. The possible cause may instead have been intraspecific combat.


title: Tyrannosaurus

text: One study of "Tyrannosaurus" specimens with tooth marks in the bones attributable to the same genus was presented as evidence of cannibalism. Tooth marks in the humerus, foot bones and metatarsals, may indicate opportunistic scavenging, rather than wounds caused by combat with another "T. rex". Other tyrannosaurids may also have practiced cannibalism.


title: Tyrannosaurus

text: "Tyrannosaurus" lived during what is referred to as the Lancian faunal stage (Maastrichtian age) at the end of the Late Cretaceous. "Tyrannosaurus" ranged from Canada in the north to at least New Mexico in the south of Laramidia. During this time "Triceratops" was the major herbivore in the northern portion of its range, while the titanosaurian sauropod "Alamosaurus" "dominated" its southern range. "Tyrannosaurus" remains have been discovered in different ecosystems, including inland and coastal subtropical, and semi-arid plains.


title: Tyrannosaurus

text: Several notable "Tyrannosaurus" remains have been found in the Hell Creek Formation. During the Maastrichtian this area was subtropical, with a warm and humid climate. The flora consisted mostly of angiosperms, but also included trees like dawn redwood ("Metasequoia") and "Araucaria". "Tyrannosaurus" shared this ecosystem with ceratopsians "Leptoceratops", "Torosaurus", and "Triceratops", the hadrosaurid "Edmontosaurus annectens," the parksosaurid "Thescelosaurus", the ankylosaurs "Ankylosaurus" and "Denversaurus", the pachycephalosaurs "Pachycephalosaurus" and "Sphaerotholus", and the theropods "Ornithomimus", "Struthiomimus", "Acheroraptor", "Dakotaraptor", "Pectinodon" and "Anzu".


title: Tyrannosaurus

text: Another formation with "Tyrannosaurus" remains is the Lance Formation of Wyoming. This has been interpreted as a bayou environment similar to today's Gulf Coast. The fauna was very similar to Hell Creek, but with "Struthiomimus" replacing its relative "Ornithomimus". The small ceratopsian "Leptoceratops" also lived in the area.


title: Tyrannosaurus

text: In its southern range "Tyrannosaurus" lived alongside the titanosaur "Alamosaurus", the ceratopsians "Torosaurus," "Bravoceratops" and "Ojoceratops", hadrosaurs which consisted of a species of "Edmontosaurus, Kritosaurus" and a possible species of "Gryposaurus", the nodosaur "Glyptodontopelta", the oviraptorid "Ojoraptosaurus", possible species of the theropods "Troodon" and "Richardoestesia", and the pterosaur "Quetzalcoatlus". The region is thought to have been dominated by semi-arid inland plains, following the probable retreat of the Western Interior Seaway as global sea levels fell.


title: Tyrannosaurus

text: "Tyrannosaurus" may have also inhabited Mexico's Lomas Coloradas formation in Sonora. Though skeletal evidence is lacking, six shed and broken teeth from the fossil bed have been thoroughly compared with other theropod genera and appear to be identical to those of "Tyrannosaurus". If true, the evidence indicates the range of "Tyrannosaurus" was possibly more extensive than previously believed. It is possible that tyrannosaurs were originally Asian species, migrating to North America before the end of the Cretaceous period.


title: Tyrannosaurus

text: According to studies published in 2021 by Charles Marshall "et al.", the total population of adult "Tyrannosaurus" at any given time was perhaps 20,000 individuals, with computer estimations also suggesting a total population no lower than 1,300 and no higher than 328,000. The authors themselves suggest that the estimate of 20,000 individuals is probably lower than what should be expected, especially when factoring in that disease pandemics could easily wipe out such a small population. Over the span of the genus' existence, it is estimated that there were about 127,000 generations and that this added up to a total of roughly 2.5 billion animals until their extinction.


title: Tyrannosaurus

text: In the same paper, it is suggested that in a population of "Tyrannosaurus" adults numbering 20,000, the number of individuals living in an area the size of California could be as high as 3,800 animals, while an area the size of Washington D.C. could support a population of only two adult "Tyrannosaurus". The study does not take into account the number of juvenile animals in the genus present in this population estimate due to their occupation of a different niche than the adults, and thus it is likely the total population was much higher when accounting for this factor. Simultaneously, studies of living carnivores suggest that some predator populations are higher in density than others of similar weight (such as jaguars and hyenas, which are similar in weight but have vastly differing population densities). Lastly, the study suggests that in most cases, only one in 80 million "Tyrannosaurus" would become fossilized, while the chances were likely as high as one in every 16,000 of an individual becoming fossilized in areas that had more dense populations.


title: Tyrannosaurus

text: Meiri (2022) questioned the reliability of the estimates, citing uncertainty in metabolic rate, body size, sex and age-specific survival rates, habitat requirements and range size variability as shortcomings Marshall "et al." didn't take into account. The authors of the original publication replied that while they agree that their reported uncertainties were probably too small, their framework is flexible enough to accommodate uncerainty in physiology, and that their calculations do not depend on short-term changes in population density and geographic range, but rather on their long-term averages. Finally, they remark that they did estimate the range of reasonable survivorship curves and that they did include uncertainty in the time of onset of sexual maturity and in the growth curve by incorporating the


title: Tyrannosaurus

text: Since it was first described in 1905, "T. rex" has become the most widely recognized dinosaur species in popular culture. It is the only dinosaur that is commonly known to the general public by its full scientific name (binomial name) and the scientific abbreviation "T. rex" has also come into wide usage. Robert T. Bakker notes this in "The Dinosaur Heresies" and explains that, "a name like "T. rex" is just irresistible to the tongue."


title: The Starry Night

text: The Starry Night () is an oil-on-canvas painting by the Dutch Post-Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh. Painted in June 1889, it depicts the view from the east-facing window of his asylum room at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, just before sunrise, with the addition of an imaginary village. It has been in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City since 1941, acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest. Widely regarded as Van Gogh's magnum opus, "The Starry Night" is one of the most recognizable paintings in Western art.


title: The Starry Night

text: In the aftermath of the 23 December 1888 breakdown that resulted in the self-mutilation of his left ear, Van Gogh voluntarily admitted himself to the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole lunatic asylum on 8 May 1889. Housed in a former monastery, Saint-Paul-de-Mausole catered to the wealthy and was less than half full when Van Gogh arrived, allowing him to occupy not only a second-story bedroom but also a ground-floor room for use as a painting studio.


title: The Starry Night

text: During the year Van Gogh stayed at the asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, the prolific output of paintings he had begun in Arles continued. During this period, he produced some of the best-known works of his career, including the "Irises" from May 1889, now in the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the blue self-portrait from September, 1889, in the Musée d'Orsay. "The Starry Night" was painted mid-June by around 18 June, the date he wrote to his brother Theo to say he had a new study of a starry sky.


title: The Starry Night

text: Although "The Starry Night" was painted during the day in Van Gogh's ground-floor studio, it would be inaccurate to state that the picture was painted from memory. The view has been identified as the one from his bedroom window, facing east, a view which Van Gogh painted variations of no fewer than twenty-one times, including "The Starry Night". "Through the iron-barred window," he wrote to his brother, Theo, around 23 May 1889, "I can see an enclosed square of wheat ... above which, in the morning, I watch the sun rise in all its glory."


title: The Starry Night

text: Van Gogh depicted the view at different times of the day and under various weather conditions, such as the sunrise, moonrise, sunshine-filled days, overcast days, windy days, and one day with rain. While the hospital staff did not allow Van Gogh to paint in his bedroom, he was able there to make sketches in ink or charcoal on paper; eventually, he would base newer variations on previous versions. The pictorial element uniting all of these paintings is the diagonal line coming in from the right depicting the low rolling hills of the Alpilles mountains. In fifteen of the twenty-one versions, cypress trees are visible beyond the far wall enclosing the wheat field. Van Gogh exaggerated their size in six of these paintings, most notably in F717 "Wheat Field with Cypresses" and "The Starry Night", bringing the trees closer to the picture plane.


title: The Starry Night

text: One of the first paintings of the view was F611 "Mountainous Landscape Behind Saint-Rémy", now in Copenhagen. Van Gogh made a number of sketches for the painting, of which F1547 "The Enclosed Wheatfield After a Storm" is typical. It is unclear whether the painting was made in his studio or outside. In his 9 June letter describing it, he mentions he had been working outside for a few days. Van Gogh described the second of the two landscapes he mentions he was working on, in a letter to his sister Wil on 16 June 1889. This is F719 "Green Wheat Field with Cypress", now in Prague, and the first painting at the asylum he definitely painted "en plein air". F1548 "Wheatfield, Saint-Rémy de Provence", now in New York, is a study for it. Two days later, Vincent wrote to Theo stating that he had painted "a starry sky".


title: The Starry Night

text: "The Starry Night" is the only nocturne in the series of views from his bedroom window. In early June, Vincent wrote to Theo, "This morning I saw the countryside from my window a long time before sunrise with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big". Researchers have determined that Venus (sometimes referred to as the "morning star"), and was at that time nearly as bright as possible. So the brightest "star" in the painting, just to the viewer's right of the cypress tree, is actually Venus.


title: The Starry Night

text: The Moon is stylized, as astronomical records indicate that it actually was waning gibbous at the time Van Gogh painted the picture, and even if the phase of the Moon had been its waning crescent at the time, Van Gogh's Moon would not have been astronomically correct. (For other interpretations of the Moon, see below.) The one pictorial element that was definitely not visible from Van Gogh's cell is the village, which is based on a sketch (F1541v) made from a hillside above the village of Saint-Rémy. Pickvance thought F1541v was done later, and the steeple more Dutch than Provençal, a conflation of several Van Gogh had painted and drawn in his Nuenen period, and thus the first of his "reminisces of the North" he was to paint and draw early the following year. Hulsker thought a landscape on the reverse (F1541r) was also a study for the painting.


title: The Starry Night

text: Despite the large number of letters Van Gogh wrote, he said very little about "The Starry Night". After reporting that he had painted a starry sky in June, Van Gogh next mentioned the painting in a letter to Theo on or about 20 September 1889, when he included it in a list of paintings he was sending to his brother in Paris, referring to it as a "night study." Of this list of paintings, he wrote, "All in all the only things I consider a little good in it are the Wheatfield, the Mountain, the Orchard, the Olive trees with the blue hills and the Portrait and the Entrance to the quarry, and the rest says nothing to me"; "the rest" would include "The Starry Night". When he decided to hold back three paintings from this batch in order to save money on postage, "The Starry Night" was one of the paintings he did not send. Finally, in a letter to painter Émile Bernard from late November 1889, Van Gogh referred to the painting as a "failure."


title: The Starry Night

text: Van Gogh argued with Bernard and especially Paul Gauguin as to whether one should paint from nature, as Van Gogh preferred, or paint what Gauguin called "abstractions": paintings conceived in the imagination, or "de tête". In the letter to Bernard, Van Gogh recounted his experiences when Gauguin lived with him for nine weeks in the autumn and winter of 1888: "When Gauguin was in Arles, I once or twice allowed myself to be led astray into abstraction, as you know. . . . But that was delusion, dear friend, and one soon comes up against a brick wall. . . And yet, once again I allowed myself to be led astray into reaching for stars that are too big—another failure—and I have had my fill of that." Van Gogh here is referring to the expressionistic swirls which dominate the upper center portion of "The Starry Night".


title: The Starry Night

text: Theo referred to these pictorial elements in a letter to Vincent dated 22 October 1889: "I clearly sense what preoccupies you in the new canvases like the village in the moonlight ["The Starry Night"] or the mountains, but I feel that the search for style takes away the real sentiment of things." Vincent responded in early November, "Despite what you say in your previous letter, that the search for style often harms other qualities, the fact is that I feel myself greatly driven to seek style, if you like, but I mean by that a more manly and more deliberate drawing. If that will make me more like Bernard or Gauguin, I can't do anything about it. But am inclined to believe that in the long run you'd get used to it." And later in the same letter, he wrote, "I know very well that the studies drawn with long, sinuous lines from the last consignment weren't what they ought to become, however I dare urge you to believe that in landscapes one will continue to mass things by means of a drawing style that seeks to express the entanglement of the masses."


title: The Starry Night

text: But although Van Gogh periodically defended the practices of Gauguin and Bernard, each time he inevitably repudiated them and continued with his preferred method of painting from nature. Like the impressionists he had met in Paris, especially Claude Monet, Van Gogh also favored working in series. He had painted his series of sunflowers in Arles, and he painted the series of cypresses and wheat fields at Saint-Rémy. "The Starry Night" belongs to this latter series, as well as to a small series of nocturnes he initiated in Arles.


title: The Starry Night

text: The nocturne series was limited by the difficulties posed by painting such scenes from nature, i.e., at night. The first painting in the series was "Café Terrace at Night", painted in Arles in early September 1888, followed by "Starry Night (Over the Rhône)" later that same month. Van Gogh's written statements concerning these paintings provide further insight into his intentions for painting night studies in general and "The Starry Night" in particular.


title: The Starry Night

text: Soon after his arrival in Arles in February 1888, Van Gogh wrote to Theo, "I need a starry night with cypresses or—perhaps above a field of ripe wheat; there are some really beautiful nights here." That same week, he wrote to Bernard, "A starry sky is something I should like to try to do, just as in the daytime I am going to try to paint a green meadow spangled with dandelions." He compared the stars to dots on a map and mused that, as one takes a train to travel on Earth, "we take death to reach a star." Although at this point in his life Van Gogh was disillusioned by religion, he appears not to have lost his belief in an afterlife. He voiced this ambivalence in a letter to Theo after having painted "Starry Night Over the Rhône", confessing to a "tremendous need for, shall I say the word—for religion—so I go outside at night to paint the stars."


title: The Starry Night

text: He wrote about existing in another dimension after death and associated this dimension with the night sky. "It would be so simple and would account so much for the terrible things in life, which now amaze and wound us so, if life had yet another hemisphere, invisible it is true, but where one lands when one dies." "Hope is in the stars," he wrote, but he was quick to point out that "earth is a planet too, and consequently a star, or celestial orb." And he stated flatly that "The Starry Night" was "not a return to the romantic or to religious ideas."


title: The Starry Night

text: Noted art historian Meyer Schapiro highlights the expressionistic aspects of "The Starry Night", saying it was created under the "pressure of feeling" and that it is a "visionary [painting] inspired by a religious mood." Schapiro theorizes that the "hidden content" of the work makes reference to the New Testament book of Revelation, revealing an "apocalyptic theme of the woman in pain of birth, girded with the sun and moon and crowned with stars, whose newborn child is threatened by the dragon." (Schapiro, in the same volume, also professes to see an image of a mother and child in the clouds in "Landscape with Olive Trees", painted at the same time and often regarded as a pendant to "The Starry Night".)


title: The Starry Night

text: Art historian Sven Loevgren expands on Schapiro's approach, again calling "The Starry Night" a "visionary painting" which "was conceived in a state of great agitation." He writes of the "hallucinatory character of the painting and its violently expressive form," although he takes pains to note that the painting was not executed during one of Van Gogh's incapacitating breakdowns. Loevgren compares Van Gogh's "religiously inclined longing for the beyond" to the poetry of Walt Whitman. He calls "The Starry Night" "an infinitely expressive picture which symbolizes the final absorption of the artist by the cosmos" and which "gives a never-to-be-forgotten sensation of standing on the threshold of eternity." Loevgren praises Schapiro's "eloquent interpretation" of the painting as an apocalyptic vision and advances his own symbolist theory with reference to the eleven stars in one of Joseph's dreams in the Old Testament book of Genesis. Loevgren asserts that the pictorial elements of "The Starry Night" "are visualized in purely symbolic terms" and notes that "the cypress is the tree of death in the Mediterranean countries."


title: The Starry Night

text: Art historian Lauren Soth also finds a symbolist subtext in "The Starry Night", saying that the painting is a "traditional religious subject in disguise" and a "sublimated image of [Van Gogh's] deepest religious feelings." Citing Van Gogh's avowed admiration for the paintings of Eugène Delacroix, and especially the earlier painter's use of Prussian blue and citron yellow in paintings of Christ, Soth theorizes that Van Gogh used these colors to represent Christ in "The Starry Night". He criticizes Schapiro's and Loevgren's biblical interpretations, dependent as they are on a reading of the crescent moon as incorporating elements of the Sun. He says it is merely a crescent moon, which, he writes, also had symbolic meaning for Van Gogh, representing "consolation."


title: The Starry Night

text: It is in light of such symbolist interpretations of "The Starry Night" that art historian Albert Boime presents his study of the painting. As noted above, Boime has proven that the painting depicts not only the topographical elements of Van Gogh's view from his asylum window but also the celestial elements, identifying not only Venus but also the constellation Aries. He suggests that Van Gogh originally intended to paint a gibbous Moon but "reverted to a more traditional image" of the crescent moon, and theorizes that the bright aureole around the resulting crescent is a remnant of the original gibbous version. He recounts Van Gogh's interest in the writings of Victor Hugo and Jules Verne as possible inspiration for his belief in an afterlife on stars or planets. And he provides a detailed discussion of the well-publicized advances in astronomy that took place during Van Gogh's lifetime.


title: The Starry Night

text: Boime asserts that while Van Gogh never mentioned astronomer Camille Flammarion in his letters, he believes that Van Gogh must have been aware of Flammarion's popular illustrated publications, which included drawings of spiral nebulae (as galaxies were then called) as seen and photographed through telescopes. Boime interprets the swirling figure in the central portion of the sky in "The Starry Night" to represent either a spiral galaxy or a comet, photographs of which had also been published in popular media. He asserts that the only non-realistic elements of the painting are the village and the swirls in the sky. These swirls represent Van Gogh's understanding of the cosmos as a living, dynamic place.


title: The Starry Night

text: Harvard astronomer Charles A. Whitney conducted his own astronomical study of "The Starry Night" contemporaneously with but independent of Boime (who spent almost his entire career at U.C.L.A.). While Whitney does not share Boime's certainty with regard to the constellation Aries, he concurs with Boime on the visibility of Venus in Provence at the time the painting was executed. He also sees the depiction of a spiral galaxy in the sky, although he gives credit for the original to Anglo-Irish astronomer William Parsons, Lord Rosse, whose work Flammarion reproduced.


title: The Starry Night

text: Whitney also theorizes that the swirls in the sky could represent wind, evoking the mistral that had such a profound effect on Van Gogh during the twenty-seven months he spent in Provence. (It was the mistral which triggered his first breakdown after entering the asylum, in July 1889, less than a month after painting "The Starry Night".) Boime theorizes that the lighter shades of blue just above the horizon show the first light of morning.


title: The Starry Night

text: The village has been variously identified as either a recollection of Van Gogh's Dutch homeland, or based on a sketch he made of the town of Saint-Rémy. In either case, it is an imaginary component of the picture, not visible from the window of the asylum bedroom.


title: The Starry Night

text: Cypress trees have long been associated with death in European culture, though the question of whether Van Gogh intended for them to have such a symbolic meaning in "The Starry Night" is the subject of an open debate. In an April 1888 letter to Bernard, Van Gogh referred to "funereal cypresses," though this is possibly similar to saying "stately oaks" or "weeping willows." One week after painting "The Starry Night", he wrote to his brother Theo, "The cypresses are always occupying my thoughts. I should like to make something of them like the canvases of the sunflowers, because it astonishes me that they have not yet been done as I see them." In the same letter he mentioned "two studies of cypresses of that difficult shade of bottle green." These statements suggest that Van Gogh was interested in the trees more for their formal qualities than for their symbolic connotation.


title: The Starry Night

text: Schapiro refers to the cypress in the painting as a "vague symbol of a human striving." Boime calls it the "symbolic counterpart of Van Gogh's own striving for the Infinite through non-orthodox channels." Art historian Vojtech Jirat-Wasiutynski says that for Van Gogh the cypresses "function as rustic and natural obelisks" providing a "link between the heavens and the earth." (Some commentators see one tree, others see two or more.) Loevgren reminds the reader that "the cypress is the tree of death in the Mediterranean countries."


title: The Starry Night

text: Art historian Ronald Pickvance says that with "its arbitrary collage of separate motifs," "The Starry Night" "is overtly stamped as an 'abstraction'." Pickvance claims that cypress trees were not visible facing east from Van Gogh's room, and he includes them with the village and the swirls in the sky as products of Van Gogh's imagination. Boime asserts that the cypresses "were" visible in the east, as does Jirat-Wasiutyński. Van Gogh biographers Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith concur, saying that Van Gogh "telescoped" the view in certain of the pictures of the view from his window, and it stands to reason that Van Gogh would do this in a painting featuring the Morning Star. Such a compression of depth serves to enhance the brightness of the planet.


title: The Starry Night

text: Soth uses Van Gogh's statement to his brother, that "The Starry Night" is "an exaggeration from the point of view of arrangement" to further his argument that the painting is "an amalgam of images." However, it is by no means certain that Van Gogh was using "arrangement" as a synonym for "composition." Van Gogh was, in fact, speaking of three paintings, one of which was "The Starry Night", when he made this comment: "The olive trees with white cloud and background of mountains, as well as the Moonrise and the Night effect," as he called it, "these are exaggerations from the point of view of the arrangement, their lines are contorted like those of the ancient woodcuts." The first two pictures are universally acknowledged to be realistic, non-composite views of their subjects. What the three pictures do have in common is exaggerated color and brushwork of the type that Theo referred to when he criticized Van Gogh for his "search for style [that] takes away the real sentiment of things" in "The Starry Night".


title: The Starry Night

text: On two other occasions around this time, Van Gogh used the word "arrangement" to refer to color, similar to the way James Abbott McNeill Whistler used the term. In a letter to Gauguin in January 1889, he wrote, "As an arrangement of colours: the reds moving through to pure oranges, intensifying even more in the flesh tones up to the chromes, passing into the pinks and marrying with the olive and Veronese greens. As an impressionist arrangement of colours, I’ve never devised anything better." (The painting he is referring to is "La Berceuse", which is a realistic portrait of Augustine Roulin with an imaginative floral background.) And to Bernard in late November 1889: "But this is enough for you to understand that I would long to see things of yours again, like the painting of yours that Gauguin has, those Breton women walking in a meadow, the arrangement of which is so beautiful, the colour so naively distinguished. Ah, you’re exchanging that for something—must one say the word—something artificial—something affected."


title: The Starry Night

text: While stopping short of calling the painting a hallucinatory vision, Naifeh and Smith discuss "The Starry Night" in the context of Van Gogh's mental illness, which they identify as temporal lobe epilepsy, or latent epilepsy. "Not the kind," they write, "known since antiquity, that caused the limbs to jerk and the body to collapse ('the falling sickness', as it was sometimes called), but a "mental" epilepsy—a seizing up of the mind: a collapse of thought, perception, reason, and emotion that manifested itself entirely in the brain and often prompted bizarre, dramatic behavior." Symptoms of the seizures "resembled fireworks of electrical impulses in the brain."


title: The Starry Night

text: Van Gogh experienced his second breakdown in seven months in July 1889. Naifeh and Smith theorize that the seeds of this breakdown were present when Van Gogh painted "The Starry Night", that in giving himself over to his imagination "his defenses had been breached." On that day in mid-June, in a "state of heightened reality," with all the other elements of the painting in place, Van Gogh threw himself into the painting of the stars, producing, they write, "a night sky unlike any other the world had ever seen with ordinary eyes."


title: The Starry Night

text: After having initially held it back, Van Gogh sent "The Starry Night" to Theo in Paris on 28 September 1889, along with nine or ten other paintings. Theo died less than six months after Vincent, in January 1891. Theo's widow Jo became the caretaker of Van Gogh's legacy. In Paris in 1900 she sold the painting to poet Julien Leclercq. In 1901 Leclercq sold it to Gauguin's old friend Émile Schuffenecker. Jo bought the painting back from Schuffenecker and in 1906 sold it to the Oldenzeel Gallery in Rotterdam. From 1906 to 1938 it was owned by Georgette P. van Stolk, of Rotterdam, who sold it to Paul Rosenberg, of Paris and New York. It was through Rosenberg that the Museum of Modern Art acquired the painting in 1941.


title: The Starry Night

text: The painting was investigated by the scientists at the Rochester Institute of Technology and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The pigment analysis has shown that the sky was painted with ultramarine and cobalt blue, and for the stars and the moon, Van Gogh employed the rare pigment indian yellow together with zinc yellow.


title: Solomon

text: Solomon (; , ), also called Jedidiah (Hebrew: , Modern: , Tiberian: "Yăḏīḏăyāh", "beloved of Yah"), was a monarch of ancient Israel and the son and successor of David, according to the Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament. He is described as having been the penultimate ruler of an amalgamated Israel and Judah. The hypothesized dates of Solomon's reign are 970–931 BCE. After his death, his son and successor Rehoboam would adopt harsh policy towards the northern tribes, eventually leading to the splitting of the Israelites between the Kingdom of Israel in the north and the Kingdom of Judah in the south. Following the split, his patrilineal descendants ruled over Judah alone.


title: Solomon

text: The Bible says Solomon built the First Temple in Jerusalem, dedicating the temple to Yahweh, or God in Judaism. Solomon is portrayed as wealthy, wise and powerful, and as one of the 48 Jewish prophets. He is also the subject of many later references and legends, most notably in the Testament of Solomon (part of first-century biblical apocrypha).


title: Solomon

text: In the New Testament, he is portrayed as a teacher of wisdom excelled by Jesus of Nazareth, and as arrayed in glory but excelled by "the lilies of the field". In the Quran, he is considered to be a major Islamic prophet and is generally referred to as "Sulaiman ibn Dawud" (, ). In mostly non-biblical circles, Solomon also came to be known as a magician and an exorcist, with numerous amulets and medallion seals dating from the Hellenistic period invoking his name.


title: Solomon

text: The life of Solomon is primarily described in 2Samuel, 1Kings and 2Chronicles. His two names mean "peaceful" and "friend of God", both considered "predictive of the character of his reign".


title: Solomon

text: The conventional dates of Solomon's reign are derived from biblical chronology and are set from about 970 to 931 BCE. Regarding the Davidic dynasty, to which King Solomon belongs, its chronology can be checked against datable Babylonian and Assyrian records at a few points, and these correspondences have allowed archaeologists to date its kings in a modern framework. According to the most widely used chronology, based on that by Old Testament professor Edwin R. Thiele, the death of Solomon and the division of his kingdom would have occurred in the fall of 931 BCE.


title: Solomon

text: Solomon was born in Jerusalem, the second born child of David and his wife Bathsheba (widow of Uriah the Hittite). The first child (unnamed in that account), a son conceived adulterously during Uriah's lifetime, had died during birth. It is suggested in Scripture that this was a judgment from God. Solomon had three named full brothers born to Bathsheba: Nathan, Shammua, and Shobab, besides six known older half-brothers born of as many mothers.


title: Solomon

text: The biblical narrative shows that Solomon served as a peace offering between God and David, due to his adulterous relationship with Bathsheba. In an effort to hide this sin, for example, he sent the woman's husband to battle, in the subsequently realised hope that he would be killed there. After he died, David was finally able to marry his wife. As punishment, the first child, who was conceived during the adulterous relationship, died. Solomon was born after David was forgiven. It is this reason why his name, which means peace, was chosen. Some historians cited that Nathan the Prophet brought up Solomon as his father was busy governing the realm. This could also be attributed to the notion that the prophet held great influence over David because he knew of his adultery, which was considered a grievous offense under the Mosaic Law.


title: Solomon

text: According to the First Book of Kings, when David was old, "he could not get warm". "So they sought a beautiful young woman throughout all the territory of Israel, and found Abishag the Shunamite, and brought her to the king. The young woman was very beautiful, and she was of service to the king and attended to him, but the king knew her not."


title: Solomon

text: While David was in this state, court factions were maneuvering for power. David's heir apparent, Adonijah, acted to have himself declared king, but was outmaneuvered by Bathsheba and the prophet Nathan, who convinced David to proclaim Solomon king according to his earlier promise (not recorded elsewhere in the biblical narrative), despite Solomon's being younger than his brothers.


title: Solomon

text: Solomon, as instructed by David, began his reign with an extensive purge, including his father's chief general, Joab, among others, and further consolidated his position by appointing friends throughout the administration, including in religious positions as well as in civic and military posts. It is said that Solomon ascended to the throne when he was only about fifteen.


title: Solomon

text: Solomon greatly expanded his military strength, especially the cavalry and chariot arms. He founded numerous colonies, some of which doubled as trading posts and military outposts.


title: Solomon

text: Trade relationships were a focus of his administration. In particular he continued his father's very profitable relationship with the Phoenician king Hiram I of Tyre (see 'wealth' below); they sent out joint expeditions to the lands of Tarshish and Ophir to engage in the trade of luxury products, importing gold, silver, sandalwood, pearls, ivory, apes and peacocks. Solomon is considered the most wealthy of the Israelite kings named in the Bible.


title: Solomon

text: Solomon was the biblical king most famous for his wisdom. In 1Kings he sacrificed to God, and God later appeared to him in a dream, asking what Solomon wanted from God. Solomon asked for wisdom in order to better rule and guide his people. Pleased, God personally answered Solomon's prayer, promising him great wisdom because he did not ask for self-serving rewards like long life or the death of his enemies.


title: Solomon

text: Perhaps the best known story of his wisdom is the Judgment of Solomon; two women each lay claim to being the mother of the same child. Solomon easily resolved the dispute by commanding the child to be cut in half and shared between the two. One woman promptly renounced her claim, proving that she would rather give the child up than see it killed. Solomon declared the woman who showed compassion to be the true mother, entitled to the whole child.


title: Solomon

text: Solomon was traditionally considered the author of several biblical books, "including not only the collections of Proverbs, but also of Ecclesiastes and the Song of Solomon and the later apocryphal book the Wisdom of Solomon."


title: Solomon

text: According to the Hebrew Bible, the ancient Kingdom of Israel gained its highest splendour and wealth during Solomon's reign of 40 years. In a single year, according to , Solomon collected tribute amounting to 666 talents (18,125 kilograms) of gold. Solomon is described as surrounding himself with all the luxuries and the grandeur of an Eastern monarch, and his government prospered. He entered into an alliance with Hiram I, king of Tyre, who in many ways greatly assisted him in his numerous undertakings.


title: Solomon

text: For some years before his death, David was engaged in collecting materials for building a temple in Jerusalem as a permanent home for Yahweh and the Ark of the Covenant. Solomon is described as undertaking the construction of the temple, with the help of an architect, also named Hiram, and other materials, sent from King Hiram of Tyre.


title: Solomon

text: After the completion of the temple, Solomon is described in the biblical narrative as erecting many other buildings of importance in Jerusalem. For 13 years, he was engaged in the building of a royal palace on Ophel (a hilly promontory in central Jerusalem). This complex included buildings referred to as:


title: Solomon

text: Solomon's throne is said to have been spectacularly opulent and possessed moving parts, making it one of the earliest mechanical devices in history. Solomon also constructed great water works for the city, and the Millo (Septuagint, "Acra") for the defense of the city. However, excavations of Jerusalem have discovered no monumental architecture from the era, and no remains of either the Temple or Solomon's palace have been found.


title: Solomon

text: Solomon is also described as rebuilding cities elsewhere in Israel, creating the port of Ezion-Geber, and constructing Palmyra in the wilderness as a commercial depot and military outpost. Although the location of the port of Ezion-Geber is known, no remains have ever been found. More archaeological success has been achieved with the major cities Solomon is said to have strengthened or rebuilt, for example, Hazor, Megiddo and Gezer. These all have substantial ancient remains, including impressive six-chambered gates, and ashlar palaces; however it is no longer the scholarly consensus that these structures date to the time, according to the Bible, when Solomon ruled.


title: Solomon

text: According to the Bible, during Solomon's reign, Israel enjoyed great commercial prosperity, with extensive traffic being carried on by land with Tyre, Egypt, and Arabia, and by sea with Tarshish, Ophir, and South India.


title: Solomon

text: According to the biblical account, Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines. The wives were described as foreign princesses, including Pharaoh's daughter and women of Moab, Ammon, Edom, Sidon and of the Hittites. His marriage to Pharaoh's daughter appears to have cemented a political alliance with Egypt, whereas he clung to his other wives and concubines "in love". The only wife mentioned by name is Naamah the Ammonite, mother of Solomon's successor, Rehoboam.


title: Solomon

text: The biblical narrative notes with disapproval that Solomon permitted his foreign wives to import their national deities, building temples to Ashtoreth and Milcom.


title: Solomon

text: In the branch of literary analysis that examines the Bible, called higher criticism, the story of Solomon falling into idolatry by the influence of Pharaoh's daughter and his other foreign wives is "customarily seen as the handiwork of the 'deuteronomistic historian(s)'", who are held to have written, compiled, or edited texts to legitimize the reforms of Hezekiah's great-grandson, King Josiah who reigned from about 641 to 609 BCE (over 280 years after Solomon's death according to Bible scholars). Scholarly consensus in this field holds that "Solomon's wives/women were introduced in the 'Josianic' (customarily Dtr) edition of Kings as a theological construct to blame the schism [between Judah and the Northern Kingdom of Israel] on his misdeeds".


title: Solomon

text: In a brief, unelaborated, and enigmatic passage, the Hebrew Bible describes how the fame of Solomon's wisdom and wealth reached even the far-off Queen of Sheba. The queen is described as visiting with gifts including gold, spices and precious stones. When Solomon gave her "all her desire, whatsoever she asked", she left satisfied (1 Kings 10:10).


title: Solomon

text: Whether the passage is simply to provide a brief foreign witness of Solomon's wealth and wisdom, or whether the visit is meant to have more significance, is unknown; nevertheless the Queen of Sheba has become the subject of numerous stories.


title: Solomon

text: Sheba is typically identified as Saba, a nation once spanning the Red Sea on the coasts of what are now Eritrea, Somalia, Ethiopia and Yemen, in Arabia Felix; although other sources place it in the area of what is now northern Ethiopia and Eritrea.


title: Solomon

text: In a Rabbinical account (e.g. Targum Sheni, ), Solomon was accustomed to ordering animals to dance before him (a power granted by God), and upon summoning the mountain-cock or hoopoe (Aramaic name: "nagar tura"), the bird told him it had discovered a land in the east, rich in gold, silver, and plants, whose capital was called "Kitor" and whose ruler was the Queen of Sheba. Solomon then sent the bird to request the queen's visit.


title: Solomon

text: An Ethiopian account from the 14th century ("Kebra Nagast") maintains that the Queen of Sheba had sexual relations with King Solomon and gave birth beside the Mai Bella stream in the province of Hamasien, Eritrea. The Ethiopian tradition has a detailed account of the affair. The child was a son who became Menelik I, King of Axum, and founded a dynasty that would reign as the Jewish, then Christian, Empire of Ethiopia which lasted 2900 years until Haile Selassie was overthrown in 1974. Menelik was said to be a practicing Jew who was given a replica of the Ark of the Covenant by King Solomon; and, moreover, that the original Ark was switched and went to Axum with him and his mother, and is still there, guarded by a single dedicated priest.


title: Solomon

text: The claim of such a lineage and of possession of the Ark was an important source of legitimacy and prestige for the Ethiopian monarchy through the centuries, and had important and lasting effects on Ethiopian culture. The Ethiopian government and church deny all requests to view the alleged ark.


title: Solomon

text: Some classical-era Rabbis, attacking Solomon's moral character, have claimed instead that the child was an ancestor of Nebuchadnezzar II, who destroyed Solomon's temple some 300 years later.


title: Solomon

text: Jewish scribes say that Solomon's teacher was Shimei (son of Gera), and while he lived, he prevented Solomon from marrying foreign wives. The Talmud says at Ber. 8a: "For as long as Shimei the son of Gera was alive Solomon did not marry the daughter of Pharaoh" (see also Midrash Tehillim to Ps. 3:1). Solomon's execution of Shimei was his first descent into sin.


title: Solomon

text: According to Solomon's "wives turned his heart after other gods", their own national deities, to whom Solomon built temples, thus incurring divine anger and retribution in the form of the division of the kingdom after Solomon's death ().


title: Solomon

text: According to and , it was because of these sins that the Lord punished Solomon by removing most of the tribes of Israel from rule by Solomon's house.


title: Solomon

text: Near the end of his life, Solomon was beset by several enemies, including Hadad of Edom, Rezon of Zobah, and his own official Jeroboam of the tribe of Ephraim.


title: Solomon

text: King Solomon is a central biblical figure, who, according to the Hebrew Bible, was the builder of the First Temple in Jerusalem and the last ruler of a united Kingdom of Israel. After a reign of forty years, he died of natural causes at around 60 years of age. Upon Solomon's death, his son, Rehoboam, succeeded him, but ten of the Tribes of Israel refused him as king, splitting the monarchy into the northern Kingdom of Israel under Jeroboam, while Rehoboam continued to reign over the much smaller southern Kingdom of Judah. Henceforth the two kingdoms were never again united.


title: Solomon

text: Solomon is associated with the peak "golden age" of the independent Kingdom of Israel and is a legendary source of judicial and religious wisdom.


title: Solomon

text: The Hebrew word "לשלמה" appears in the title of two hymns (72 and 127) in the Book of Psalms. This Hebrew word means "to Solomon", but it can also be translated as "by Solomon," thus suggesting to some that Solomon wrote the two psalms.


title: Solomon

text: Rabbinical tradition attributes the "Wisdom of Solomon" (included within the Septuagint) to Solomon, although this book was probably written in the 2nd century BCE. In this work, Solomon is portrayed as an astronomer. Other books of wisdom poetry such as the "Odes of Solomon" and the "Psalms of Solomon" also bear his name. The Jewish historian Eupolemus, who wrote about 157 BCE, included copies of apocryphal letters exchanged between Solomon and the kings of Egypt and Tyre.


title: Solomon

text: The Gnostic "Apocalypse of Adam", which may date to the 1st or 2nd century, refers to a legend in which Solomon sends out an army of demons to seek a virgin who had fled from him, perhaps the earliest surviving mention of the later common tale that Solomon controlled demons and made them his slaves. This tradition of Solomon's control over demons appears fully elaborated in the early pseudoepigraphical work called the "Testament of Solomon" with its elaborate and grotesque demonology.


title: Solomon

text: As with most biblical personages in the middle era of Israelite society, the historicity of Solomon is hotly debated. Current consensus states that regardless of whether or not a man named Solomon truly reigned as king over the Judean hills in the tenth century BCE, the Biblical descriptions of his apparent empire's lavishness is almost surely an anachronistic exaggeration.


title: Solomon

text: As for Solomon himself, scholars on both the maximalist and minimalist sides of the spectrum of biblical archeology generally agree that he probably existed. However, a historically accurate picture of the Davidic king is difficult to construct. According to some archaeologists, Solomon could have only been the monarch or chieftain of Judah, and that the northern kingdom was a separate development. Such positions have been criticized by other archaeologists and scholars, who argue that a united monarchy did exist in the 10th century BC, while agreeing that the biblical account contains exaggerations.


title: Solomon

text: Historical evidence of King Solomon other than the biblical accounts has been so minimal that some scholars have understood the period of his reign as a 'Dark Age' (Muhly 1998). The first-century Romano-Jewish scholar Josephus in "Against Apion", citing Tyrian court records and Menander, gives a specific year during which King Hiram I of Tyre sent materials to Solomon for the construction of the Temple. However, no material evidence indisputably of Solomon's reign has been found. Yigael Yadin's excavations at Hazor, Megiddo, Beit Shean and Gezer uncovered structures that he and others have argued date from Solomon's reign, but others, such as Israel Finkelstein and Neil Silberman, argue that they should be dated to the Omride period, more than a century after Solomon.


title: Solomon

text: According to Finkelstein and Silberman, authors of "The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts", at the time of the kingdoms of David and Solomon, Jerusalem was populated by only a few hundred residents or less, which is insufficient for an empire stretching from the Euphrates to Eilath. According to "The Bible Unearthed", archaeological evidence suggests that the kingdom of Israel at the time of Solomon was little more than a small city state, and so it is implausible that Solomon received tribute as large as 666 talents of gold per year. Although both Finkelstein and Silberman accept that David and Solomon were real inhabitants of Judah about the 10th century BCE, they claim that the earliest independent reference to the Kingdom of Israel is about 890 BCE, and for Judah about 750 BCE. They suggest that because of religious prejudice, the authors of the Bible suppressed the achievements of the Omrides (whom the Hebrew Bible describes as being polytheist), and instead pushed them back to a supposed golden age of Judaism and monotheists, and devotees of Yahweh. Some Biblical minimalists like Thomas L. Thompson go further, arguing that Jerusalem became a city and capable of being a state capital only in the mid-7th century. Likewise, Finkelstein and others consider the claimed size of Solomon's temple implausible.


title: Solomon

text: André Lemaire states in "Ancient Israel: From Abraham to the Roman Destruction of the Temple" that the principal points of the biblical tradition of Solomon are generally trustworthy, although elsewhere he writes that he could find no substantiating archaeological evidence that supports the Queen of Sheba's visit to king Solomon, saying that the earliest records of trans-Arabian caravan voyages from Tayma and Sheba unto the Middle-Euphrates etc. occurred in the mid-8th century BCE, placing a possible visit from the Queen of Sheba to Jerusalem around this time—some 250 years later than the timeframe traditionally given for king Solomon's reign. Seventeen years later, traces of cinnamon were found in Phoenician clay flasks from three small sites in the Israeli coastal plain dating from the 10th century BCE. The authors suggested that trade routes with South Asia existed much earlier than previously thought.


title: Solomon

text: Kenneth Kitchen argues that Solomon ruled over a comparatively wealthy "mini-empire", rather than a small city-state, and considers 666 gold talents a modest amount of money. Kitchen calculates that over 30 years, such a kingdom might have accumulated up to 500 tons of gold, which is small compared to other examples, such as the 1,180 tons of gold that Alexander the Great took from Susa. Similarly, Kitchen and others consider the temple of Solomon a reasonable and typically sized structure for the region at the time. Dever states "that we now have direct Bronze and Iron Age parallels for every feature of the 'Solomonic temple' as described in the Hebrew Bible".


title: Solomon

text: Some scholars have charted a middle path between minimalist scholars like Finkelstein, Silberman, and Philip Davies (who believes that "Solomon is a totally invented character") and maximalist scholars like Dever, Lemaire and Kitchen. For instance, the archaeologist Avraham Faust has argued that biblical depictions of Solomon date to later periods and do overstate his wealth, buildings, and kingdom, but that Solomon did have an acropolis and ruled over a polity larger than Jerusalem. In particular, his archaeological research in regions near Jerusalem, like Sharon, finds commerce too great not to be supported by a polity and such regions probably were ruled loosely by Jerusalem. Scholars like Lester Grabbe also believe that there must have been a ruler in Jerusalem during this period and that he likely built a temple, although the town was quite small. William G. Dever argues that Solomon only reigned over Israel and did build a temple, but that descriptions of his lavishness and the other conquests are strongly exaggerated.


title: Solomon

text: The archaeological remains that are considered to date from the time of Solomon are notable for the fact that Canaanite material culture appears to have continued unabated; there is a distinct lack of magnificent empire, or cultural development—indeed comparing pottery from areas traditionally assigned to Israel with that of the Philistines points to the latter having been significantly more sophisticated. However, there is a lack of physical evidence of its existence, despite some archaeological work in the area. This is not unexpected because the area was devastated by the Babylonians, then rebuilt and destroyed several times.


title: Solomon

text: Little archaeological excavation has been done around the area known as the Temple Mount, in what is thought to be the foundation of Solomon's Temple, because attempts to do so are met with protests by the Muslim authorities.


title: Solomon

text: The biblical passages that understand Tarshish as a source of King Solomon's great wealth in metals—especially silver, but also gold, tin and iron (Ezekiel 27)—were linked to archaeological evidence from silver-hoards found in Phoenicia in 2013. The metals from Tarshish were reportedly obtained by Solomon in partnership with King Hiram of Phoenician Tyre (Isaiah 23) and the fleets of Tarshish and ships that sailed in their service. The silver hoards provide the first recognized material evidence that agrees with the ancient texts concerning Solomon's kingdom and his wealth (see 'wealth' below).


title: Solomon

text: Possible evidence for the described wealth of Solomon and his kingdom was discovered in ancient silver hoards, which were found in Israel and Phoenicia and recognized for their importance in 2003. The evidence from the hoards shows that the Levant was a center of wealth in precious metals during the reigns of Solomon and Hiram, and matches the texts that say the trade extended from Asia to the Atlantic Ocean.