The prehistoric reptile Tyrannosaurus rex was a champion chomper with the ability to bite down with force equal to the weight of three small cars while generating tooth pressure matched by no other known creature, researchers have found.

The iconic dinosaur could bite down with nearly 8,000 pounds of force, more than two times greater than the bite of the largest living crocodiles, which reign as today’s bite force champions.

The study by a Florida State University and Oklahoma State University research team was published in Scientific Reports.

T. rex owed its fearsome chomp to long, cone-shaped teeth that generated a prodigious 431,000 pounds per square inch of tooth pressure. They gave the dinosaur the ability to pulverize bone, a talent known as extreme osteophagy. Today, carnivorous mammals including wolves and hyenas exhibit extreme osteophagy but reptiles, the dinosaur’s modern relatives, do not have teeth that allow for chewing up bones.

The ability to bite deeply into bones, pulverizing and digesting them, provided T. rex with a unique ability to derive sustenance from scavenging carcasses of giant horned-dinosaurs like Triceratops, duck-billed hadrosaurids and even other T. rex.

T. rex drove open cracks in bone during repetitive, mammal-like biting that produced high-pressure fractures leading to catastrophic explosion of some bones.

“It was this bone-crunching acumen that helped T. rex to more fully exploit… mineral salts and marrow unavailable to smaller, less equipped carnivorous dinosaurs,” said researcher Paul Gignac, assistant professor of anatomy and vertebrate paleontology at Oklahoma State University Center for Health Sciences.

The researchers have extensively studied and modeled how the musculature of living crocodilians, close relatives of dinosaurs, contributes to bite force. They compared results with birds, which are modern-day dinosaurs, and generated a model for T. rex.

From this work, they realized bite force was only part of the story. To understand how T. rex consumed bone, the researchers also needed to understand how the force was transmitted through the dinosaur’s teeth.

“Having high bite force doesn’t necessarily mean an animal can puncture hide or pulverize bone,” said study co-author Gregory Erikson, Florida State University professor of biological science. “Tooth pressure is the biomechanically more relevant parameter. It is like assuming a 600 horsepower engine guarantees speed. In a Ferrari, sure, but not for a dump truck.”

The new study is one of several by the authors and colleagues that demonstrate how sophisticated feeding abilities of modern mammals and their immediate ancestors first appeared in reptiles during the age of the dinosaurs.

© Content That Works