A rare fossil in the collection of the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana, is the subject of new research that suggests its shows signs of an attack by a Tyrannosaurus rex.
As reported by Phys.org, the skull of an Edmontosaurus—a duck-billed creature that counts among the last dinosaurs to exist—has a Tyrannosaurus tooth lodged within it in a way that indicates a fateful bite to the face. The skull, found in 2005 in eastern Montana and currently on display in the Museum of the Rockies’s Hall of Horns and Teeth, is the subject of a paper published in the journal PeerJ. (Its not-so-snappy title: “Behavioral implications of an embedded tyrannosaurid tooth and associated tooth marks on an articulated skull of Edmontosaurus from the Hell Creek Formation, Montana.”)
“Although bite marks on bones are relatively common, finding an embedded tooth is extremely rare,” said Taia Wyenberg-Henzler, a University of Alberta doctoral student who collaborated on the paper with Museum of the Rockies curator of paleontology John Scannella. “The great thing about an embedded tooth, particularly in a skull, is it gives you the identity of not only who was bitten but also who did the biting. This allowed us to paint a picture of what happened to this Edmontosaurus, kind of like Cretaceous crime scene investigators.”
Scannella, the curator, said, “A fossil like this is extra exciting because it captures a behavior: a tyrannosaur biting into this duckbill’s face. The skull shows no signs of healing around the tyrannosaur tooth, so it may have already been dead when it was bitten, or it may be dead because it was bitten.”
Wyenberg-Henzler concurred, with a bit more dramatic flair. “Looking at the way the tooth is embedded in the nose of the Edmontosaurus suggests that it met its attacker face-to-face, something that usually happens to an animal that was killed by a predator,” she said. “The amount of force necessary for a tooth to have become broken off in bone also points to the use of deadly force. For me, this paints a terrifying picture of the last moments of this Edmontosaurus.”
