The
Tyrannosaurus rex in
Jurassic Park bit right through a Ford Explorer. But what about the real dinosaurs? It turns out that
T. rex
really had jaw power to make up for those useless little arms. They
chewed through the bones of their prey, which is unusual even among
dinosaurs.
Bone crushing—extreme osteophagy in the
scientific parlance—is a trait exhibited by just a handful of mammalian
scavengers and predators today, including the spotted hyena and the gray
wolf. Osteophagy is almost unheard of in reptiles; their long, conical
teeth don’t tend to clamp together to deliver the crushing forces needed
to shatter bone. And yet Gregory Erickson, FSU paleontologist and
co-author of the new study published today in Scientific Reports, has
long observed that the bite marks on the brutalized carcasses of T.rex
lunches indicate a bone-chewer.
That's not the only evidence pointing to the massive power of the
T. rex bite. Read about
the research and findings of T. rex jaw strength at Gizmodo.
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