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T. rex may have been a very successful predator, but it would have been terrible to lick stamps, lollipops or ice lollypops, thanks to a tongue that was probably attached to the bottom of his mouth.
New study challenges artists' interpretations T. rex and other dinosaurs that show them with their tongues protruding from gaping jaws – a pose that is commonly seen in modern lizards. But even if the lizards are at the top of the tongue waving, the dinosaurs probably could not get out their tongue, the researchers recently discovered.
Soft tissues are rarely kept in the fossil record, so scientists have focused their attention on a structure called hyoid – a group of bones that supports and anchors the tongue. They looked at the hyoids in dinosaurs and in their closest living relatives, birds and crocodilians, to see if they could lick the problem of the ability to move the tongue among the missing dinosaurs.
Based on the similarities they found between the hyoid bones of dinosaurs and crocodilians, the researchers found that dinosaur tongues were probably similar to those of alligators and crocodiles – firmly attached to the floor of their mouths .
"It's an aspect of the anatomy of the dinosaurs that people probably do not think of, but it's a key part of any organism's lifestyle," commented Julia Clarke, co-author from the Vertebrate Paleontology of the University of Texas at Austin, said Live Science.
The representations of dinosaurs with lizard-like languages listen to the first interpretations of the beasts as oversized lizards. This misconception persists today in popular representations of dinosaurs, even though it has long been established that dinosaurs' closest relatives are birds and crocodilians, Clarke explained.
Modern bird tongues are exceptionally diverse and can be highly mobile, thanks to complex hyoids that include multiple structures that can extend along the midline up to the tip of the tongue . The languages of hummingbirds, for example, are flexible micropumps that are so long that they wrap around the skull of the bird when it is retracted, like a tape measure.
However, most of the extinct dinosaurs have hyoid structures that look more like those of crocodilians – a simple pair of short rods. In alligators, crocodiles and their relatives, muscles and connective tissues fix the tongue of the animals all the way from base to tip. The hyoidal similarities between dinosaurs and crocodilians suggest that their tongues are similar as well, so the dinosaurs were probably not capable of stretch-tongue feats displayed by birds, Clarke said.
Scientists have found similarities between the hyoid birds and those of an unexpected group: pterosaurs. Like birds, pterosaurs can fly. But the group represents a lineage of dinosaurs different from that of dinosaurs, and they are not close relatives.
What could explain the similarity between hyoid structures in birds and pterosaurs? One possibility is that the two groups evolved separately from more complex and mobile languages when they took to the skies, to better manage a new type of diet that was not available to the soil inhabitants, the researchers wrote in the study, published online today. 20) in the journal PLOS ONE.
Meanwhile, the probably less mobile languages of dinosaurs could have served them well in feeding strategies such as those used by crocodilians – a "bite and swallow" approach – where languages play a less active role and do not handle not the food after it's in their mouths, says Clarke Science live.
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