It’s the royal dino rumble that has inspired a love of paleontology in kids for decades: Tyrannosaurus, the ultimate predator with teeth like “lethal bananas”, versus Triceratops with its massive shield-like crest and trio of badass horns. It’s been known that Tyrannosaurus did eat Triceratops based on bites found on fossils, but exactly how they went about their feasts hasn’t been a focus of study until now. Denver Fowler, of the Museum of the Rockies in Montana, presented some in-progress research at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology’s meeting last week that suggests Tyrannosaurus fed on Triceratops by ripping their heads clean off.By studying the Tyrannosaur toothmarks on 18 separate Triceratops specimens, Fowler and his co-authors found that Tyrannosaurs seemed to regularly bite the Triceratops’ frills, which is counterintuitive because the frills were mostly keratin and bone. But the marks weren’t likely from battles; none showed signs of healing, which suggests they were all from post-mortem carcass processing. Instead, because the marks were consistent across their study subjects, the team posited something remarkably gruesome: Tyrannosaurus used Triceratops’ frills as a lever to rip their skulls from their body, like a tab on a soda can, to expose dense and meaty neck muscles.Before I get into a couple caveats, let’s check out how the process worked, via drawings by Nate Carroll and assembled by Nature:First, the Tyrannosaurus would get a nice grip on a dead Triceratops’s frill…Then it would start to rip that carcass open.
Fowler’s crew also found more gentle bite marks on the Triceratops skulls, which suggests Tyrannosaurus took the time to pick at the facial flesh. Hey, Andrew Zimmern and Bourdain always say eat the face!Finally, with the head popped off, the Tyrannosaurus could feast on the meat under the frill and in the neck.Now, on to those caveats. As Fowler noted in a great blog post, what he presented at his SVP was a poster of his paper, not a final, published paper. Conferences like SVP are great because researchers are able to present researcher in progress via posters, and invite comment from the community before they draft a paper and submit it to the peer-review process, where said research may be accepted, edited, or rejected.Fowler stands behind his work, especially because of his notably large sample size, and according to his post, no one disputed that he was looking at evidence of Triceratops being nibbled on by Tyrannosaurus, and not some other large predator.As he did note, it’s notoriously difficult to assign behavioral traits based off of the fossil record. But he did argue that his evidence is strong, writing:Any inference of behaviours in extinct organisms is often passed off as arm-waving, or as something we cannot know based on evidence. We feel that our dataset is robust enough to make some inferences about behaviour. The specimens represent data: ie. they are direct evidence of something an animal actually DID, rather than the results of computer modelling that shows what an animal MIGHT DO.I think that’s a valid point, and if the prevalence of bites on Triceratops frills is indeed attributable to Tyrannosaurus, then Fowler’s explanation is an intriguing way of describing a novel behavior. It’s hard to imagine that anything could have repeatedly bitten around the rim of Triceratops’ frills during a battle, rather than post-mortem, and even if so, you’d expect to eventually find evidence with signs of healing. (As fearsome as Tyrannosaurus likely was, a 100 percent kill rate seems rather impossible.)Again, Fowler’s work is not final, and still needs to be fully written up before it can be submitted for peer review, so things may change. But nonetheless it’s a fascinating bit of work, and it is well-presented. And, really, it makes sense: predators generally try to eat as much of a kill as they can — killing things with tooth and claw is hard — so you’d imagine that Tyrannosaurus would do everything it could to get at juicy areas of a carcass, even if that meant popping open a Triceratops like a PBR. Which begs the question: Who’s going to be the first to create a T. rex-shotgunning-Triceratops GIF? Update: Pabst sent me this, which is a good start.Follow Derek Mead on Twitter: @derektmead.
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Credit: Nate Carroll
Credit: Nate Carroll
Credit: Nate Carroll
Credit: Nate Carroll
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