We have good reason to suspect that Tyrannosaurus rex could swim. It’s hard to imagine, tiny-armed giant that it was, but it’s true.

Most animals can swim in some form or another regardless of whether they’re adapted for moving through water. The big question, really, isn’t could T. rex swim? It’s how did T. rex swim.

Could T. rex swim? The evidence
Sir David Attenborough took on the question of how T. rex might swim in Apple TV’s Prehistoric Planet. The series went in hard with briefly-aquatic T. rex, featuring it doing a kind of doggy paddle on the series posters. So, what evidence is there of this behavior?

We’ve found swim traces thought to be made by the claws of a two-legged dinosaur, like T. rex, scraping along the sediment. Some theropod swim traces were found in the Cameros Basin in La Rioja, Spain.

Hundreds of footprints were found at the site, but some of these were cut through by swim traces, indicating the water level rose and our walking dinosaurs had to get swimming. We’ve found similar marks (thousands of them, in fact) in Utah, so it doesn’t seem like swimming was all that rare.