If you grew up rewatching the scene where the Jurassic Park T. rex snaps its jaws inches from a Jeep, you already have a picture of what a tyrannosaur attack looks like: sudden, brutal, and face-first. A new study published in the journal PeerJ says scientists have found an actual fossil that lines up with almost that exact scenario, minus the four-wheeled vehicle.
It happened about 66 million years ago in what is now Montana, leaving behind one very unlucky dinosaur, according to an official release from Montana State University.
A tooth stuck in the face tells the whole story
In 2005, researchers discovered a nearly complete skull of Edmontosaurus, a large, plant-eating, duck-billed dinosaur, on land managed by the Bureau of Land Management in Montana’s Hell Creek Formation. The skull sat in the collection at Montana State University's Museum of the Rockies when researchers turned their attention to what made the skull so odd: a broken tooth jammed into the animal’s nasal bone, a tooth that did not belong to the Edmontosaurus itself.
In the PeerJ study titled ‘Behavioral implications of an embedded tyrannosaurid tooth and associated tooth marks on an articulated skull of Edmontosaurus from the Hell Creek Formation, Montana’ that embedded tooth is described as belonging to a Tyrannosaurus. Today, the skull is displayed in the museum’s Hall of Horns and Teeth and was the subject of an investigation led by University of Alberta doctoral student Taia Wyenberg-Henzler and Museum of the Rockies curator John Scannella.
