T Rex bite could have crushed a car - here's how

But while multiple lines of evidence support this estimate of the dinosaur’s mighty bite force, debate has swirled about how it got the job done with what seems to be a loosely jointed skull. The results, presented this month in the journal The Anatomical Record, show that the skull bones of T. rex must have been held fixed and rigid for the animal to have had such a fearsome bite. “You want to take all the force from the muscles and put it into the prey through your teeth, and not have it leak out through a bunch of wiggly joints.” A mechanical T. rex skull cracks a bone as part of a study of its powerful bite. To test the idea, Holliday and his former graduate student Ian Cost, now an assistant professor at Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania, created digital models of T. rex skulls with palates that were able to flex out to the sides like those of geckoes, or ones that moved up and down like those of grey parrots. “The results presented in this study, which has been carried out with tremendous attention to detail, not only demonstrate that the skull of T. rex could resist very high bite forces, but precisely how it did so,” says Laura Porro, an expert on fossil biomechanics at University College London. Eric Snively, a paleobiologist at Oklahoma State University in Tulsa who has also studied the feeding mechanics of T. rex, says that the research “helps answer how T. rex could bite with the highest forces of any land animal.” Tyrannosaurs are unusual, he argues, because their teeth are strongest at the front of the mouth, unlike predators such as crocodiles, which have their crushing teeth at the back.  “Their snouts were fused up with interlocking bones on the bridge of the nose, but until the current study, we didn’t understand how the rest of the cranium functioned,” he says.