A recently excavated dinosaur bone has revealed a 66 million year old family secret of Tyrannosaurus Rex. They would eat their own kind. The teeth marks on the bones hinted that they were marks of a strong chew.
“We were out in Wyoming digging up dinosaurs in the Lance Formation when we found the bone. Someone found a tyrannosaur bone that was broken at both ends. It was covered in grooves. They were very deep grooves,” said paleontologist Matthew McLain of the University of California, as mentioned in The Geological Society of America .
Source: Geological Society of America
The grooves clearly indicated that the animals pulled the flesh off the bone in a similar fashion when humans eat a piece of fried chicken. One groove particularly stood out which was located at the larger end of the bone and contained smaller parallel grooves which were results of head turning so that the serrated edges of its teeth dragged across the bone.
“This has to be a Tyrannosaur, there’s just nothing else that has such big teeth. Exactly who did the eating that day, in the Late Cretaceous, could still be sorted out by the same grooves. It only works if you know what species it is and since tyrannosauruses are the only large predators in these formations, it’s pretty straightforward,” added McLain. Read more: