UOften when paleontologists unearth dinosaur bones, they have no idea what led to their ultimate demise. But the fossil of a duck-billed Edmontosaurus discovered in 2005 from the Hell Creek Formation in Montana contained a very obvious clue – a sharp tooth buried in the skull.
Tatiana Wyenberg-Henzler of the University of Alberta collaborated with John Scannella, director of the Museum of the Rockies, on peer magazine This week.
“The great thing about embedded teeth, especially in the skull, is that it not only lets you know who was bitten, but who bit the person,” she added. “This allows us to map out what happened to Edmontosaurus, kind of like a Cretaceous crime scene investigator.”
They started like any crime scene investigators, carefully examining the victim’s body (in this case, a CT scan of an Edmontosaurus skull) and the murder weapon (an embedded tooth cusp). To identify the culprit, they rounded up the usual suspects—other carnivorous dinosaurs common in the Hell Creek Formation—and compared their teeth to those in the skull. They found their match: a Tyrannosaurus rex.
Read more: “The spy who discovered the T-Rex”
The team determined that the tooth likely came from the middle of the T. rex’s jaw, piercing the skull with lethal force. The lack of any healing around the wound suggests it was likely a fatal blow, although they admit they cannot rule out the possibility that the T. rex lost a tooth while scavenging.
“A fossil like this is particularly exciting because it captures a behavior: T. rex biting a platypus in the face,” Scannella explained. “The skull around the T. rex’s teeth shows no signs of healing, so it could have been dead at the time of the bite or it could have died from the bite.”
Debate over whether T. rex was a fearsome predator or a lowly scavenger has raged for years, but the team points out that most modern carnivores share a lineage. Additionally, they cite the theory that the T. rex’s skull and jaws were designed to clamp down on the snouts of prey and suffocate them, like wild dogs – a scenario consistent with evidence in this case.
“Observing the way the teeth were embedded in Edmontosaurus’s snout suggests that it encountered its attacker face-to-face, a situation that typically occurs in animals killed by predators,” Weinberg-Hentsler said. “The force required to break the teeth also suggests that lethal force was used. To me, this paints a horrific picture of Edmontosaurus’ final moments.”
Still, we can think about Tyrannosaurus rex. Dentists did not exist in prehistoric times.
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Main image: PeerJ
This story originally appeared on the Nautilus .
