T. Rex's Bite More Dangerous Than Previously Believed

Jennifer Welsh, LiveScience Staff Writer

The tyrant lizard, also known as Tyrannosaurus rex, had the strongest bite of any known land animal, new research suggests.

"Our results show that the T. rex had an extremely powerful bite, making it one of the most dangerous predators to have roamed our planet," study researcher Karl Bates, of the University of Liverpool, said in a statement.

Younger T. rexes didn't have such strong bites, the researchers found, which probably meant they had a different diet and relied less on the fearsome bite than their older counterparts. This differing diets likely led reduced competition between generations of T. rex, the researchers said.

Fearsome bite

The new estimate of bite force is higher than past estimates that relied on indent measures in which they pressed down the skull and teeth onto a bone until they got the imprints that matched those on fossils. In the new study, the researchers created a computer model of the dinosaur's jaw by first digitally scanning skulls from an adult and juvenile T. rex, an allosaurus, an alligator and an adult human. They used these scans to model each animal's bite.

"We took what we knew about T. rex from its skeleton and built a computer model," Bates said. "We then asked the computer model to produce a bite so that we could measure the speed and force of it directly."

The force exerted at one of T. rex's back teeth would have been between 7,868 and 12,814 pounds-force (35,000 and 57,000 newtons). This force would be akin to having a medium-size elephant sit on you.

Read more:  http://www.livescience.com/18718-trex-strong-bite.html