The big bite of the teenage T. rex

UC Berkeley associate professor, Jack Tseng, explains his research on juvenile T. rexes and what the findings tell us about the lifestyle of the teenage tyrannosaur.

Tseng loves bone-crunching animals — hyenas are his favorite — so when paleontologist Joseph Peterson discovered fossilized dinosaur bones that had teeth marks from a juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex, Tseng decided to try to replicate the bite marks and measure how hard those kids could actually chomp down.

Last year, he and Peterson made a metal replica of a scimitar-shaped tooth of a 13-year-old juvie T. rex, mounted it on a mechanical testing frame commonly used in engineering and materials science, and tried to crack a cow legbone with it.

Based on 17 successful attempts to match the depth and shape of the bite marks on the fossils — he had to toss out some trials because the fresh bone slid around too much — he determined that a juvenile could have exerted up to 5,641 newtons of force, somewhere between the jaw forces exerted by a hyena and a crocodile.

Compare that to the bite force of an adult T. rex — about 35,000 newtons — or to the puny biting power of humans: 300 newtons.

Previous bite force estimates for juvenile T. rexes — based on reconstruction of the jaw muscles or from mathematically scaling down the bite force of adult T. rexes — were considerably less, about 4,000 newtons. CONT'D...

Video by Roxanne Makasdjian and Jeremy Snowden
Additional media courtesy of:
Robert De Palma, Paleontologist (sketches) — 1:05 to 1:11, and 34 to 40 secs
Live Science (digital art)— 52 secs to 1 min
Brian Engh, Paleo Artist (sketches) — 1:01 to 1:04 and 1:11 to 1:17
Eric Snively (Cal ’93), Associate Professor of Anatomy, Oklahoma State University (T. Rex models and X rays) — 1:18 to 1:21
Joseph E. Peterson Ph.D., Associate Professor of Geology, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh (photos) — 1:50 to 1:56
Raphtor, Creative Commons (digital art) — 2:25 to 2:34
Chipp Kidd (background art) — 3:07 to 3:12

[firegator]

t rex makes me feel like it's...lets say a "fragile cannon"
if it gets hit really bad by an adult triceratops or the tail of a fully grown ankylosaurus it may be done for but if it lands even just one successful bite with ambush there is time to kill the prey easily...well makes sense these animals were not fast runners at all so a first successful bite when hunting would be really important

that is for the adults i mean

[gilbertozuniga]

Why can’t hyenas evolve into Tyranosaurus Rexes?

[SuperMasterOfTheObvious]

Quien más está a aquí por dross que diga Enrique Ganem*?