T-Rex's bite was 'three times greater than shark'

[frigidmagi]

telegraph

The dinosaur could bring its jaws together with a remarkable force of up to 57,000 Newtons (13,000 lbs) - four times more than previous estimates.

Its performance surpasses that of all animals, both living and extinct, including today's great white shark, the most terrifying modern day creature which packs a 3,600 pound (1.8 tons) bite.
Musculoskeletal biologist Dr Karl Bates said: "Our results show T Rex had an extremely powerful bite making it one of the most dangerous predators to have roamed our planet."

His researchers at Liverpool University made computer models of T Rex's jaw and compared it with similar reconstructions of the skulls of another theropod dinosaur Allosaurus, an alligator and a human.

They found it clamped down on is prey with a crushing force up to almost fifty times more than a large African lion (1,235lbs).

Dr Bates said: "Models predict adult T. rex generated sustained bite forces of 35,000 (8,000lbs) to 57,000 Newtons at a single posterior tooth, by far the highest bite forces estimated for any terrestrial animal."

The study published in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters provides the first direct bite predictions and suggests T. rex probably had the most powerful bite of any terrestrial animal ever to have existed.

Results also suggest adult T. rex had a powerful bite in both absolute and relative terms for its body size, and that biting performance increased during growth, allowing it to kill and eat other big dinosaurs that were around at the time.

Dr Bates said: "The larger it grew the more it would have slowed down so its forearms got relatively smaller and its head bigger.

"This adds to evidence that it would have hunted and killed beasts that were even bigger than itself such as Triceratops and the armoured dinosaurs, possibly because it needed to prey on bigger animals to sustain itself."

He said the Nile crocodile's bite that has been measured at a force of 5,000 lbs (22,000 Newtons) is the closest living creature to it.

Then there is the Great White Shark but comparing a terrestrial animal with an aquatic one is "like chalk and cheese."

His team artificially scaled up the skulls of a human, alligator, a juvenile T Rex and Allosaurus to the size of an adult T Rex. In each case the bite forces increased but not to the level of the fully grown T Rex.

Dr Bates said: "Bite mechanics and feeding behaviour in Tyrannosaurus rex are controversial. Some contend a modest bite mechanically limited T. rex to scavenging, while others argue that high bite forces facilitated a predatory mode of life."

The researchers also found the juvenile T Rex has a relatively weaker bite than the adult suggesting feeding behaviour changed as it grew.

Juveniles possessed a lower, longer snouted skull than adult T. rex. Expansion of the skull with maturity potentially provided greater volume for jaw-closing.

Tyrannosaur body proportions changed appreciably during development and biomechanical analyses have provided strong evidence that young individuals were more athletic than adults.
With bite forces comparable to alligators and lions, combined with relatively long forelimbs and hindlimbs, juvenile T. rex appears well equipped to pursue and dispatch small to medium-sized prey.

Dr Bates said: "Forelimbs became significantly reduced in adults, and our results strongly suggest increasing importance of the skull in food procurement as compensation.

"Enhancement of an already highly competent biting apparatus during the exponential growth phase may be indicative of a change in feeding behaviour as T. rex reached adulthood.

"Living carnivores preying on large animals have relatively high bite forces, while carnivores preying on small prey have more moderate bite forces for their size, suggesting that bite force represents an important adaptation to differing feeding ecologies, at least throughout carnivoran evolution."

Attaining adult body sizes, combined with specialised jaw anatomy underpinning high mechanical performance, may have allowed adult T. rex to function as a 'large prey specialist', alleviating direct competition from smaller, more agile carnivores, including juvenile T. rex.

Dr Bates said: "The power of the T Rex jaw has been a much debated topic over the years.

"Scientists only have the skeleton to work with as muscle does not survive with the fossil so we often have to rely on statistical analysis or qualitative comparisons to living animals which differ greatly in size and shape from the giant enigmatic dinosaurs like T Rex.

"As these methods are somewhat indirect it can be difficult to get an objective insight into how dinosaurs might have functioned and what they may or may not have been capable of in life.

"To build on previous methods of analysis we took what we knew about T Rex rom its skeleton and built a computer model that incorporated the major anatomical and physiological factors that determine bite performance.

"We then asked the computer model to produce a bite so we could measure the speed and force of it directly. We compared this to other animals of smaller body mass and also scaled up smaller animals to the size of T rex to compare how powerful it was in relative terms."

Dr Bates added: "Ots unique musculoskeletal system will continue to fascinate scientists for years to come."

[Comrade Tortoise]

No one apparently validated his model by recording living bite force. I will have to read the paper to dissect it further.