Most of us don't think the tyrannosaur was a sweet, cuddly and mild-natured creature. Well, here's some evidence bolstering our ferocious image of the dinosaur: researchers stumbled upon a new bone they say strongly suggests tyrannosaur cannibalism. The team will present its findings Sunday at the annual Geological Society of America meeting.
A tyrannosaur bone uncovered in Wyoming's Lance Formation, broken at both ends, was covered in "very deep groves," paleontologist Matthew McLain of Loma Linda University said in a release.
The groves indicate another animal had pulled flesh off of the bone, in the same way we a human might eat a chicken leg, according to the researchers. But one segment of the bone contained a bunch of smaller, parallel grooves, which may have been caused by the animal turning its head while eating and dragging its serrated teeth across the bone.
Those serrated teeth mean the animal eating the tyrannosaur was most likely another theropod dinosaur, "and the width of the larger grooves suggests the traces were made by a tyrannosaur," researchers write.
"This has to be a tyrannosaur," McLain said. "There's just nothing else that has such big teeth."
Plus, McLain said, no other theropods have been found in the Lance Formation other than the Tyrannosaurus rex and Nanotyrannus lancensis, both members of the genus Tyrannosaurus. It's hard to say whether or not the predator and the prey in this instance were the same species, so we can't quite leap to the conclusion of Hannibal Lector-style cannibalism among the dinos. But we're still talking about the equivalent of a lion chowing down on a panther, at the very least. There's something uncouth about eating your close cousins for dinner.
This isn't the first fossil that suggests tyrannosaur cannibalism. Earlier this year, British researchers presented their forensic report on a pretty beat up Daspletosaurus that strongly suggests a bigger tyrannosaur gobbled it up, possibly as a scavenger.
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