The bite of a Tyrannosaurus rexera so powerful it could have destroyed a car. Applying six tons pressure, this beast of the Cretaceous was able to crush the bones of their victims as if they were a crisp cookie. This ability has astonished palaeontologists, unable to explain how the dinosaur did not break the skull to tighten the jaws of that form. Now they think they know the reason.
apparently, the skull of T. rex was not lightly articulated, as is believed, but fixed and rigid. The study is signed by paleontologists from the Faculty of Medicine, Missouri (USA) in the journal "Anatomical Record".
For a long time, scientists have thought that the skull almost two metres long and one metre and a half of the king of the tyrannosaurs could be similar to that of their relatives modern. Many of the reptiles and birds of today have bones flexible mobile on the palate. To test this theory, the researchers used a combination of imaging, anatomy and engineering to create models of how the force of the bite might have affected the bones in the skull of the extinct animal.
The team observed how the palate of the mouth of the T. rex reacted to the stresses and strains of mastication according to several models of training. For example, a skull similar to that of a lizard and gave it to T. rex to the possibility of flexing the palate to the sides, and a larger version similar to that of a parrot would have allowed him to move the bones up and down.
After analyzing various models, the researchers concluded that the only way that the tyrannosaurus had a bite so fierce was to have a skull rigid, such as hyenas and crocodiles.
human Medicine"The dinosaurs are like birds, crocodiles, and lizards modern in the fact that they inherit joint individuals in their skulls to the fish (ball joints, very similar to that of the hips of the people) that seem to be, but not always, to movements as in the snakes," says Casey Holliday, a professor of anatomy at MU. "When you put a lot of force on things, there is a tradeoff between the motion and the stability. Birds and lizards have more movement but less stability. When we apply their individual movements to the skull of T. rex, we saw that he did not like to be moved out of the way that the skulls of lizards and birds, suggesting more rigidity".
in Addition to help the paleontologists with a detailed study of the anatomy of the animals now fossilized, the researchers believe that their findings may help advance human and veterinary medicine to provide better models of how they interact with joints and ligaments.
"In humans, this may also apply to the operation of the jaws, in order to study the stresses during mastication," says Ian Cost, principal investigator of the study. "In animals, understand how to produce those movements, and how to load the joints will help, for example, to the veterinarians to better understand how to treat exotic animals, like parrots, that are suffering from arthritis in their faces."
Date Of Update: 02 October 2019, 18:00
