as a study published yesterday determines just how strong his bite really was,
well it turns out to be bone crushingly strong, amongst mammals bone crushing, extreme osteophagy
in the scientific parlance, is a trait exhibited by just a handful of mammalian
scavengers and predators today, including the spotted hyena and the gray wolf, osteophagy is almost unheard of in reptiles, their long, conical teeth don’t
tend to clamp together to deliver the crushing forces needed to shatter bone so Gregory Erickson, FSU palaeontologist,
along with paleontologist Paul Gignac, performed a comprehensive analysis of
the animal’s bite, but used the bite characteristics of a similar still living animal,
the saltwater crocodile, the animal with one of the worlds strongest bite pressure as
a term of reference, combining measurements from T.rex skulls and teeth,
high-resolution casts, and an anatomical model Paul M. Gignac developed during grad
school to predict bite forces in crocodilians based on their musculature, ultimately,
the researchers estimated a T.rex could deliver some 8,000 pounds of bite force
on average, (the figure for us mere humans is 162 pounds!),
from the report, 'Left ilium of Triceratops sp. (MOR 799) in ventrolateral view with ~80 bite marks attributed to Tyrannosaurus rex. A large portion (~17%) of the iliac crest was removed (bracketed) by repetitive, localised biting' more significantly for bone
crushing, the animal’s tooth pressure, a measure of how forces are transmitted
through each tooth, reached a staggering 431,000 pounds per square inch, the
researchers found, together that the high bite force and bone pressure allowed T.rex to
drill into bones through repeated gnashing, eventually causing them to shatter
or explode, for the full run down of this bone crushing creature the report is published here in Scientific Reports.
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