The Viking journey of mice and men
ScienceDaily (Mar. 19, 2012) — House mice (Mus musculus) happily live wherever there are humans. When populations of humans migrate the mice often travel with them. New research published in BioMed Central’s open access journal BMC Evolutionary Biology has used evolutionary techniques on modern day and ancestral mouse mitochondrial DNA to show that the timeline of mouse colonization matches that of Viking invasion.
During the Viking age (late 8th to mid 10th century) Vikings from Norway established colonies across Scotland, the Scottish islands, Ireland, and Isle of Man. They also explored the north Atlantic, settling in the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Newfoundland and Greenland. While they intentionally took with them domestic animals such as horses, sheep, goats and chickens they also inadvertently carried pest species, including mice.
A multinational team of researchers from the UK, USA, Iceland, Denmark and Sweden used techniques designed to characterize genetic similarity, and hence the relatedness of one population, or one individual, with another, to determine a mouse colonization timeline. Modern samples of mouse DNA were collected and compared to ancient samples dating mostly from the 10th to the 12th century. Samples of house mouse DNA were collected from nine sites in Iceland, Narsaq in Greenland, and four sites near the Viking archaeological site, L’Anse aux Meadows, in Newfoundland. The ancient samples came from the Eastern and Western settlements in Greenland and four archaeological sites in Iceland.
Analysis of mouse mitochondrial DNA showed that house mice (M. m. domesticus) hitched a lift with the Vikings, in the early 10th century, into Iceland, either from Norway or the northern part of the British Isles. From Iceland the mice continued their journey on Viking ships to settlements in Greenland. However, while descendants of these stowaways can still be found in Iceland, the early colonizers in Greenland have become extinct and their role has been filled by interloping Danish mice (M. m. musculus) brought by a second wave of European human immigrants.
Dr Eleanor Jones (affiliated with the University of York and Uppsala University) explained, “Human settlement history over the last 1000 years is reflected in the genetic sequence of mouse mitochondrial DNA. We can match the pattern of human populations to that of the house mice.” Prof Jeremy Searle, from Cornell University, continued, “Absence of traces of ancestral DNA in modern mice can be just as important. We found no evidence of house mice from the Viking period in Newfoundland. If mice did arrive in Newfoundland, then like the Vikings, their presence was fleeting and we found no genetic evidence of it.”
T. Rex’s Killer Smile Revealed
ScienceDaily (Mar. 18, 2012) — One of the most prominent features of life-size models of Tyrannosaurus rex is its fearsome array of flesh-ripping, bone-crushing teeth.
Until recently, most researchers who studied the carnivore’s smile only noted the varying sizes of its teeth. But University of Alberta paleontologist Miriam Reichel discovered that beyond the obvious size difference in each tooth family in T. rex’s gaping jaw, there is considerable variation in the serrated edges of the teeth.
“The varying edges, or keels, not only enabled T. rex’s very strong teeth to cut through flesh and bone,” says Reichel, “the placement and angle of the teeth also directed food into its mouth.”
Reichel analyzed the teeth of the entire tyrannosaurid family of meat-eating dinosaurs and found T. rex had the greatest variation in tooth morphology or structure. The dental specialization was a great benefit for a dinosaur whose preoccupation was ripping other dinosaurs apart.
Reichel’s research shows that the T. rex’s front teeth gripped and pulled, while the teeth along the side of the jaw punctured and tore flesh. The teeth at the back of the mouth did double duty: not only could they slice and dice chunks of prey, they forced food to the back of the throat.
Reichel says her findings add strength to the classification of tyrannosaurids as heterodont animals, which are animals with teeth adapted for different functions depending on their position in the mouth.
One surprising aspect of T. rex teeth, common to all tyrannosaurid’s, is that they weren’t sharp and dagger-like. “They were fairly dull and wide, almost like bananas,” said Reichel. “If the teeth were flat, knife-like and sharp, they could have snapped if the prey struggled violently when T. rex’s jaws first clamped down.”
Reichel’s research was published in The Canadian Journal of Earth Science.
Mystery Human Fossils Put Spotlight On China
ScienceDaily (Mar. 14, 2012) — Fossils from two caves in south-west China have revealed a previously unknown Stone Age people and give a rare glimpse of a recent stage of human evolution with startling implications for the early peopling of Asia.
The fossils are of a people with a highly unusual mix of archaic and modern anatomical features and are the youngest of their kind ever found in mainland East Asia.
Dated to just 14,500 to 11,500 years old, these people would have shared the landscape with modern-looking people at a time when China’s earliest farming cultures were beginning, says an international team of scientists led by Associate Professor Darren Curnoe, of the University of New South Wales, and Professor Ji Xueping of the Yunnan Institute of Cultural Relics and Archeology.
Details of the discovery are published in the journal PLoS ONE. The team has been cautious about classifying the fossils because of their unusual mosaic of features.
“These new fossils might be of a previously unknown species, one that survived until the very end of the Ice Age around 11,000 years ago,” says Professor Curnoe.
“Alternatively, they might represent a very early and previously unknown migration of modern humans out of Africa, a population who may not have contributed genetically to living people.”
The remains of at least three individuals were found by Chinese archaeologists at Maludong (or Red Deer Cave), near the city of Mengzi in Yunnan Province during 1989. They remained unstudied until research began in 2008, involving scientists from six Chinese and five Australian institutions.
A Chinese geologist found a fourth partial skeleton in 1979 in a cave near the village of Longlin, in neighbouring Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. It stayed encased in a block of rock until 2009 when the international team removed and reconstructed the fossils.
The skulls and teeth from Maludong and Longlin are very similar to each other and show an unusual mixture of archaic and modern anatomical features, as well as some previously unseen characters.
While Asia today contains more than half of the world’s population, scientists still know little about how modern humans evolved there after our ancestors settled Eurasia some 70,000 years ago, notes Professor Curnoe.
The scientists are calling them the “Red-deer Cave people” because they hunted extinct red deer and cooked them in the cave at Maludong.
The Asian landmass is vast and scientific attention on human origins has focussed largely on Europe and Africa: research efforts have been hampered by a lack of fossils in Asia and a poor understanding of the age of those already found.
Until now, no fossils younger than 100,000 years old have been found in mainland East Asia resembling any species other than our own (Homo sapiens). This indicated the region had been empty of our evolutionary cousins when the first modern humans appeared. The new discovery suggests this might not have been the case after all and throws the spotlight once more on Asia.
“Because of the geographical diversity caused by the Qinghai-Tibet plateau, south-west China is well known as a biodiversity hotspot and for its great cultural diversity. That diversity extends well back in time” says Professor Ji.
In the last decade, Asia has produced the 17,000-year-old and highly enigmatic Indonesian Homo floresiensis (“The Hobbit”) and evidence for modern human interbreeding with the ancient Denisovans from Siberia.
“The discovery of the red-deer people opens the next chapter in the human evolutionary story — the Asian chapter — and it’s a story that’s just beginning to be told,” says Professor Curnoe.
Two New Species of Horned Dinosaur Named
ScienceDaily (Mar. 12, 2012) — Two new horned dinosaurs have been named based on fossils collected from Alberta, Canada. The new species, Unescopceratops koppelhusae and Gryphoceratops morrisoni, are from the Leptoceratopsidae family of horned dinosaurs. The herbivores lived during the Late Cretaceous period between 75 to 83 million years ago. The specimens are described in research published in the Jan. 24, 2012, online issue of the journal Cretaceous Research.
“These dinosaurs fill important gaps in the evolutionary history of small-bodied horned dinosaurs that lack the large horns and frills of relatives like Triceratops from North America,” said Michael Ryan, Ph.D., curator of vertebrate paleontology at The Cleveland Museum of Natural History, lead author on the research. “Although horned dinosaurs originated in Asia, our analysis suggests that leptoceratopsids radiated to North America and diversified here, since the new species, Gryphoceratops, is the earliest record of the group on this continent.”
Unescoceratops koppelhusae lived approximately 75 million years ago. It measured about one to two meters (6.5 feet) in length and weighed less than 91 kilograms (200 pounds). It had a short frill extending from behind its head but did not have ornamentation on its skull. It had a parrot-like beak. Its teeth were lower and rounder than those of any other leptoceratopsid. In addition, its hatchet-shaped jaw had a distinct portion of bone that projected below the jaw like a small chin.
The lower left jaw fragment of Unescoceratops was discovered in 1995 in Dinosaur Provincial Park, a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Site by Philip Currie, Ph.D., now of the University of Alberta. Originally described in 1998 by Ryan and Currie, the dinosaur was referred to as Leptoceratops. Subsequent research by Ryan and David Evans, Ph.D., of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada, determined the specimen was a new genus and species. The genus is named to honor the UNESCO World Heritage Site designation for the locality where the specimen was found and from the Greek “ceratops,” which means “horned face.” The species is named for Eva Koppelhus, Ph.D., a palynologist at the University of Alberta and wife of Currie.
Gryphoceratops morrisoni lived about 83 million years ago. It had a shorter and deeper jaw shape than any other leptoceratopsid. Researchers believe the individual was a full-grown adult. Based on unique characteristics of the jaw and its size, the researchers believe that Gryphoceratops was an adult that did not exceed one-half meter in length. This means it is the smallest adult-sized horned dinosaur in North America and one of the smallest adult-sized plant-eating dinosaurs known.
Lower right jaw fragments of Gryphoceratops were discovered in southern Alberta in 1950 by Levi Sternberg while he worked for the Royal Ontario Museum. The genus is named for “Gryphon,” a mythological Greek figure with the body of a lion and the head of an eagle, which is a reference to the animal’s beaked face. The species name honors Ian Morrison, a Royal Ontario Museum technician, who discovered how the bones fit together.
Second author Evans, associate curator of vertebrate palaeontology at the Royal Ontario Museum and assistant professor at the University of Toronto, said, “Small-bodied dinosaurs are typically poorly represented in the fossil record, which is why fragmentary remains like these new leptoceratopsids can make a big contribution to our understanding of dinosaur ecology and evolution.”
Contributing authors are Philip Currie, Ph.D., of the University of Alberta; Caleb Brown of the University of Toronto; and Don Brinkman, Ph.D., of the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology.
Ancestor of Biggest Dinosaurs: First Dinosaur Discovered in Spain Dates Back 15 Million Years Earlier Than Thought
ScienceDaily (Mar. 12, 2012) — A research group from Aragon, that has the same name as the first Aragosaurus ischiaticus dinosaur discovered 25 years ago in Teruel, reveals that it lived 15 million years earlier than originally believed. Its new dating means that it was the ancestor of the Titanosauriforms, which includes the biggest dinosaurs.
The Aragosaurus was the first sauropod dinosaur described in Spain some 25 years ago in Galve (Teruel), but its age was never clear. The new dating would make it the only dinosaur of the Hauterivian age (between 136 and 130 million years ago) to be found in Spain.
“This is the only dinosaur of this period found in Spain and is also the most intact in Europe. It can be categorised amongst the well known sauropods of the Jurassic-Cretaceous transition (135 million years ago), the most abundant species during the Barremian age (116 million years ago). As this group has been studied the least, the Aragosaurus fills the gap,” explains José Ignacio Canudo, lead author of the study and researcher in the University of Zaragoza’s Aragosaurus-IUCA Group, which stands for the Aragon Research Institute of Environmental Sciences.
Its new age means that Aragosaurus fills in the transitional period between the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, of which there is little record in the world. Canudo points out that, “Aragosaurus would have therefore been a primitive ancestor of the titanosauraus sauropods that would later dominate Europe and Asia during the Late Cretaceous Period.”
Published in Geological Magazine, the study shows that Aragosaurus, found by José Luis Sanz and his team in 1987, is the oldest of its kind ever found and it could even be a common ancestor. The researcher said that, “the group could have originated in Europe, or even in Iberia, but there is still a lot more to be found out.”
The new finding also reveals that in the Early Cretaceous Period (135 million years ago), what we now know as the European Continent was made up of a series of large islands that could have been, “the point of origin for many vertebrate groups including sauropod dinosaurs like the Basal Titanosauriform.”
Fossil dating: An “almost” impossible mission
In order to situate the dinosaurs on their corresponding branch of the evolutionary tree, their remains require dating. In some cases though, this is lacking. Dating dinosaur remains can be problematic due the little information available on the age of the sediments where the fossils lie.
In relation to Aragosaurus ischiaticus “there are some lagoons that allude to its stratigraphic position,” outlines Candudo, adding that dating “can often be complicated due to imprecision in continental scales.” For this reason, the age of some dinosaur species can vary “even by tens of millions of years,” assures the geologist.
The research group carried out their detailed geological field work to find the remains in the lower part of the Castellar Formation site in Teruel. As the lower part is “not as rich” in fossils compared to the upper part, the only Aragosaurus remains that could be dated were a pollen fossil assemblage.
In Canudo’s opinion, specifying the age of dinosaurs is “fundamental” in determining the paleobiogeography and evolution of these beings. As the scientist concludes, “incorrect aging provides the wrong results when determining the correlation between continents.”
Two New Extinct Camel Species Discovered at Panama Canal Excavation
ScienceDaily (Feb. 29, 2012) — The discovery of two new extinct camel species by University of Florida scientists sheds new light on the history of the tropics, a region containing more than half the world’s biodiversity and some of its most important ecosystems.
Appearing online this week in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, the study is the first published description of a fossil mammal discovered as part of an international project in Panama. Funded with a grant from the National Science Foundation, UF paleontologists and geologists are working with the Panama Canal Authority and scientists at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute to make the most of a five-year window of excavations during Panama Canal expansions that began in 2009.
The discovery by Florida Museum of Natural History researchers extends the distribution of mammals to their southernmost point in the ancient tropics of Central America. The tropics contain some of the world’s most important ecosystems, including rain forests that regulate climate systems and serve as a vital source of food and medicine, yet little is known of their history because lush vegetation prevents paleontological excavations.
“We’re discovering this fabulous new diversity of animals that lived in Central America that we didn’t even know about before,” said co-author Bruce MacFadden, vertebrate paleontology curator at the Florida Museum on the UF campus and co-principal investigator on the NSF grant funding the project. “The family originated about 30 million years ago and they’re found widespread throughout North America, but prior to this discovery, they were unknown south of Mexico.”
Researchers described two species of ancient camels that are also the oldest mammals found in Panama: Aguascalietia panamaensis and Aguascalientia minuta. Distinguished from each other mainly by their size, the camels belong to an evolutionary branch of the camel family separate from the one that gave rise to modern camels based on different proportions of teeth and elongated jaws.
“Some descriptions say these are ‘crocodile-like’ camels because they have more elongated snouts than you would expect,” said lead author Aldo Rincon, a UF geology doctoral student. “They were probably browsers in the forests of the ancient tropics. We can say that because the crowns are really short.”
Rincon discovered the fossils in the Las Cascadas formation, unearthing pieces of a jaw belonging to the same animal over a span of two years, he said.
“When I came back to the museum, I started putting everything together and realized, ‘Oh wow, I have a nearly complete jaw,’ ” Rincon said.
The study shows that despite Central America’s close proximity to South America, there was no connection between continents because mammals in the area 20 million years ago all had North American origins. The Isthmus of Panama formed about 15 million years later and the fauna crossed to South America 2.5 to 3 million years ago, MacFadden said.
Barry Albright, a professor of earth science at the University of North Florida who studied the early Miocene fauna of the Gulf Coast Plain, said he was surprised by the similarity of the Central American fauna.
“To me, it’s slightly unexpected,” Albright said. “That’s a large latitudinal gradient between the Gulf Coastal Plain and Panama, yet we’re seeing the same mammals, so perhaps that tells us something about climate over that interval of time and dispersal patterns of some mammals over that interval of time.”
Camels belong to a group of even-toed ungulates that includes cattle, goats, sheep, deer, buffalo and pigs. Other fossil mammals discovered in Panama from the early Miocene have been restricted to those also found in North America at the time. While researchers are sure the ancient camels were herbivores that likely browsed in forests, they are still analyzing seeds and pollen to better understand the environment of the ancient tropics.
“People think of camels as being in the Old World, but their distribution in the past is different than what we know today,” MacFadden said. “The ancestors of llamas originated in North America and then when the land bridge formed about 4 to 5 million years ago, they dispersed into South America and evolved into the llama, alpaca, guanaco and vicuña.”
Researchers will continue excavating deposits from the Panama Canal during construction to widen and straighten the channel and build new locks, expected to continue through 2014. The project is funded by a $3.8 million NSF grant to develop partnerships between the U.S. and Panama and engage the next generation of scientists in paleontological and geological discoveries along the canal. Study co-authors include Jonathan Bloch of UF, and Catalina Suarez and Carlos Jaramillo of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.
Floor of Oldest Fossilized Forest Discovered: 385 Million Years Old
ScienceDaily (Mar. 1, 2012) — Scientists from Binghamton University and Cardiff University, and New York State Museum researchers, and have reported the discovery of the floor of the world’s oldest forest in a cover article in the March 1 issue of Nature.
“It was like discovering the botanical equivalent of dinosaur footprints,” said Dr. William Stein, associate professor of biological sciences at Binghamton University, and one of the article’s authors. “But the most exciting part was finding out just how many different types of footprints there were. The newly uncovered area was preserved in such a way that we were literally able to walk among the trees, noting what kind they were, where they had stood and how big they had grown.”
Scientists are now piecing together a view of this ancient site, dating back about 385 million years ago, which could shed new light on the role of modern-day forests and their impact on climate change.
The recent discovery was made in the same area in Schoharie County where fossils of Earth’s oldest trees — the Gilboa stumps — were discovered in the 1850s, 1920 and again in 2010 and were brought to the State Museum. The Museum has the world’s largest and best collection of Gilboa fossil tree stumps. For decades scientists did not know what the trees connected to the stumps looked like. That mystery was solved when Linda VanAller Hernick, the State Museum’s Paleontology collections manager, and Frank Mannolini, Paleontology collections technician, found fossils of the tree’s intact crown in a nearby location in 2004, and a 28-foot-long trunk portion in 2005. Mannolini, Hernick, and Dr. Christopher M. Berry, a paleobotany lecturer at Cardiff University in Wales, co-authored a Nature article reporting that discovery, as well as the most recent one. Working in conjunction with Stein, Mannolini also developed a sketch of the ancient forest.
“This spectacular discovery and the resulting research provide more answers to the questions that have plagued scientists for more than a century since the first Gilboa stumps were uncovered and brought to the State Museum,” said Hernick, whose passionate interest in the fossils date back to her childhood exposure to the Gilboa fossils. In 2003 Hernick wrote The Gilboa Fossils, a book published by the State Museum, about the history and significance of the fossils and their use in an iconic exhibition about the Earth’s oldest forest that was in the Museum’s former location in the State Education Department building on Washington Avenue. One of the key planners of the exhibition, which influenced generations of paleontologists, was Winifred Goldring, the nation’s first female state paleontologist who was based at the State Museum. She worked tirelessly to study and interpret the Gilboa fossils and named the trees Eospermatopteris, or “ancient seed fern.” In 1924, her paper about the stumps, together with the Museum exhibition, brought the “Gilboa forest” to the attention of the world. One of the Gilboa stumps will be on display in the Museum lobby, beginning March 2. Following the discovery of the tree’s crown, a thorough investigation was conducted by Stein and Dr. Christopher M. Berry, a paleobotany lecturer at Cardiff University in Wales and the other co-author of both Nature articles. They were able to determine that these trees actually resembled modern-day cycads or tree ferns, but interestingly enough, were not related to either one. Many questions still remained about what the surrounding area looked like, whether other plant life co-existed with these trees and how.
In 2010, during ongoing repair of the Gilboa Dam, New York City Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) engineers excavated infill from a quarry in Schoharie County. They agreed to allow researchers to re-examine the site where the fossils had been found when the dam was built in the 1920s. What they found this time was a large, substantially intact portion of the ancient forest horizon, complete with root systems. As they had expected, Eospermatopteris root systems of different sizes were the most abundant. But what they didn’t expect to find was the level of detail of the overall composition of the forest.
The first glimpse of the unexpected complexity of this ancient forest came when Stein, Berry, Hernick and Mannolini found the remains of large scrambling tree-sized plants, identified as aneurophytaleans. These plants were likely close ecological associates to the original trees, living among them on the forest floor like modern ferns, possibly scrambling into the forest canopy much as tropical vines do today. The aneurophytes are the first in the fossil record to show true “wood” and the oldest known group in the lineage that lead to modern seed plants.
Work on the new discoveries also pointed to the vital importance that the State Museum’s collections have played in the paleontological research. “Discovery of scrambling aneurophytaleans at Gilboa was a complete surprise, but pointed to the likelihood that similar material had already been found at the site, but was unrecognized,” said Hernick. “Sure enough in the State Museum collections a wonderful specimen, originally collected in the 1920s, provided additional key evidence.”
The team also came across a tree belonging to the class Lycopsida, or club mosses, which predates an earlier discovery made in Naples, NY and an ecologically important group in the history of land plants. The lycopsids are an ancient group of non-seed plants represented today by low growing forms such as the “running pines” of the northern hardwood forests of New York. They also inhabited swamps and ended up being much of the Pennsylvanian coal we burn today.
Based on the new research, the team now believes that the area probably enjoyed a wetland environment in a tropical climate. It was filled with large Eospermatopteris trees that resembled weedy, hollow, bamboo-like plants, with roots spreading out in all directions, allowing other plants to gain a foothold. Scrambling among these roots on the forest floor were aneurophytaleans, acting much like ferns do today, and possibly climbing into the forest canopy as vines. The lycopsids, although seemingly rare, may also have been very important in certain places although perhaps not yet as specialized inhabitants of swamps.
But what the research team believes is most important about this particular site is what it was doing to impact the rest of the planet. At the time the Gilboa forest began to emerge — during the Middle Devonian period, about 385 million years ago — Earth experienced a dramatic drop in global atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and the associated cooling led ultimately to a period of glaciation.
“Trees probably changed everything,” said Stein. “Not only did these emerging forests likely cause important changes in global patterns of sedimentation, but they may have triggered a major extinction in fossil record.”
For Stein, it all comes down to one thing — how much we don’t know but need to understand about our ancient past. “The complexity of the Gilboa site can teach us a lot about the original assembly of our modern day ecosystems,” said Stein. “As we continue to understand the role of forests in modern global systems, and face potential climate change and deforestation on a global scale, these clues from the past may offer valuable lessons for managing our planet’s future.”
T. Rex Has Most Powerful Bite of Any Terrestrial Animal Ever
ScienceDaily (Feb. 28, 2012) — Research at the University of Liverpool, using computer models to reconstruct the jaw muscle of Tyrannosaurus rex, has suggested that the dinosaur had the most powerful bite of any living or extinct terrestrial animal.
The team artificially scaled up the skulls of a human, alligator, a juvenile T. rex, and Allosaurus to the size of an adult T. rex. In each case the bite forces increased as expected, but they did not increase to the level of the adult T. rex, suggesting that it had the most powerful bite of any terrestrial animal.
Previous studies have estimated that T. rex‘s bite had a force of 8,000 to 13,400 Newtons, but given the size of the animal, thought to weigh more than 6,000kg, researchers suspected that its bite may have been more powerful than this. Liverpool scientists developed a computer model to reverse engineer the animal’s bite, a method that has previously been used to predict dinosaur running speeds.
An animal’s bite force is largely determined by the size of the jaw muscles. Using their computer models, researchers tested a range of alternative muscle values, as it is not precisely known what the muscles of dinosaurs were like. Even with error margins factored in, the computer model still showed that the T. rex had a more powerful bite than previously suggested.
The smallest values predicted were around 20,000 Newtons, while the largest values were as high as 57,000 Newtons, which would be equivalent to the force of a medium sized elephant sitting down on the ground.
Researchers also found that the results for the juvenile T. rex had a relatively the weaker bite than the adult T. rex, even when size differences and uncertainties about muscle size were taken into account. The large difference between the two measurements, despite the error margins factored in, may suggest that T. rex underwent a change in feeding behaviour as it grew.
Dr Karl Bates, from the University’s Department of Musculoskeletal Biology, said: “The power of the T. rex jaw has been a much debated topic over the years. Scientists only have the skeleton to work with, as muscle does not survive with the fossil, so we often have to rely on statistical analysis or qualitative comparisons to living animals, which differ greatly in size and shape from the giant enigmatic dinosaurs like T. rex. As these methods are somewhat indirect, it can be difficult to get an objective insight into how dinosaurs might have functioned and what they may or may not have been capable of in life.
“To build on previous methods of analysis, we took what we knew about T. rex from its skeleton and built a computer model that incorporated the major anatomical and physiological factors that determine bite performance. We then asked the computer model to produce a bite so that we could measure the speed and force of it directly. We compared this to other animals of smaller body mass and also scaled up smaller animals to the size of T. rex to compare how powerful it was in relative terms.
“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. Its unique musculoskeletal system will continue to fascinate scientists for years to come.”