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T. Rex’s fused nasal bones turned them into ‘zoological superweapons’
Researchers seem to finally know what gave the fearsome T. Rex the brute strength to rend apart prey with a single bite of its massive jaw.
Fused nasal bone intended to protect the T. Rexes’ skull from rupturing while crunching the bones of their prey, greatly increased the biting power of these dinosaurs, said University of Alberta researcher, Dr Eric Snively.
According to Dr. Snively, the “fused, arch-like nasal bones were a unique feature of tyrannosaurids,” and though intended to keep the T. rexes from breaking their own skull while breaking the bones of their prey”, they turned these predators into a “zoological superweapon”.
For their study, Dr. Snively and co-authors, number-crunching physicist Donald Henderson from the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology and Doug Phillips from the University of Calgary, compared the skulls and teeth of a number of tyrannosaurids and non-tyrannosaurids.
They looked at the structural mechanics of dinosaur skulls, and used CT scans to investigate such factors as teeth bending strength and nasal and cranium strength.
The researchers found that fused tyrannosaurid nasals were stronger than unfused carnosaur nasals.
The extensive fusion increased the strength of these dinosaurs and helped them apply powerful bites that could splinter bone.
“With other carnivorous dinosaurs, their skull bones might shear apart slightly when they chomp down on other animals. With tyrannosaurs, all the bite force was delivered to the prey. The T. rex especially had a very strong skull and jaw muscles that would turn it into a zoological superweapon,s said Dr. Snively.
“medium-sized T. rex had even more skull strength than a larger carnivorous creature, such as the Carcharadontosaurus saharicus, with a head nearly one and a half times as long. The T. Rex’s neck power was similarly staggering. For instance, in a split second, a T. rex could toss its head at a 45 degree angle and throw a 50 kg person five metres in the air. And that’s with conservative estimates of the creature’s muscle force,” he said.
“We kept the muscle numbers down because we thought they couldn’t possibly be that powerful, but Tyrrell museum colleagues showed that a T. Rex’s lower jaw could apply 200,000 Newtons of force ”that’s like lifting a semi-trailer. All of the T. Rex’s features came together to give it the strongest bite of any land animal. The T. Rex just blows everyone out of the water when it comes to strength”, he added.
The research is published in the journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica. (ANI)
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