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The powerful Tyrannosaurus Rex was the culinary robot par excellence. It did not really bother to tear bone meat in the same way as the smaller predators and scavengers of the day. Instead, he used his incredibly powerful jaws to crush absolutely everything, including bones, and he was not afraid to swallow everything.
But if that were the case, and if the creature regularly slammed its jaw on dead or dying dinosaur bones, it would seem equally likely that T. rex's skull would crack or break as well. Researchers at the University of Missouri wanted to understand why this had not happened and how the powerful king of the dinosaurs had managed to pulverize a bone without splitting his skull.
To get to the bottom of this mystery, researchers are not only studying the bones themselves, but also the different tissues that hold the jaw and skull in place. This gave them a better idea of the stress suffered by the skull during feeding and revealed an interesting quirk about the skull of T. rex.
It turned out that the jaws of T. rex were less flexible from side to side than previously thought. Unlike modern day birds and most reptiles, the jaw of T. rex would not have much room for maneuver, which would have contributed to its stability.
"Dinosaurs are like birds, crocodiles and lizards of modern times in that they inherit particular joints in their skulls of fish – spherical joints, like the hip joints of men – that seem to lend themselves , but not always, to movements similar to snakes. , "Casey Holliday, co-author of a new article on research published in a The anatomical filesaid in a statement. "When you put a lot of force into things, there is a compromise between movement and stability. Birds and lizards have more movement but less stability. When we applied their individual movements to the skull of T. rex, we found that he did not like being squirmed as do the skulls of lizards and birds, suggesting a greater rigidity. "
The skull of T. rex seems to have been specially built to destroy everything, and according to what his fossils told us, it's exactly what he did.
Image Source: JUSTIN LANE / EPA-EFE / Shutterstock
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