Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
topic on the upper parts of both of your feet. Not so bad, is it? Now imagine what
it would feel like if you dropped this topic from waist height, and onto just the big
toeofonefoot.Dropping the topic wouldcertainlyincreasetheforceexertedbythe
topic, but pressure would also increase dramatically because of this force striking a
smaller area, and even more so if the corner of the topic was the first point of con-
tact. Now think about a
Tyrannosaurus
mouth, the muscles connected to its jaws,
thosejawsopeningandthenclosing,withthehugeforceofthebitetransmittedinto
the small areas represented by points of teeth.
Still, the researchers' biting mechanism needed something to actually bite,
such as real bone. This would effectively test whether depths of the original tooth-
marks in bone could be produced artificially. Seeing that
Triceratops
bones were
both too valuable and too fossilized to use, the researchers turned to a more easily
procuredsupplyoffreshhipbonesfromdomesticcattle.Sowiththisbitingmachine
and “victims” in place, the researchers were ready to start making their own traces.
Theresultsofthisexperimentwereastounding.Althoughnearlyeveryonesus-
pected that
T. rex
was a terrific chomper, no one had been able to put numbers
to this presumption. Bite-force estimates came out to 6,400 to 13,400 N, which
at the time were greater than those known for any living animal, and confirmed
that
T. rex
could have easily crunched its food, bones and all, living or dead. In
later experiments done on modern alligators and crocodiles, Erickson and other
researchers found the largest American alligators (
Alligator mississippiensis
) had
bite forces within the same range as
T. rex
(9,400 N). But most impressive of all
were estuarine crocodiles (
Crocodylus porosus
)—known warmly by Australians as
“salties”—which had maximum bite forces of 16,400 N. These findings further im-
plied that
Deinosuchus
, a gigantic Late Cretaceous crocodilian, probably had a bite
far more powerful than that of
T. rex
or any other land-lubbing theropods. (It was
nottoosurprising, then, when paleontologists later foundtoothmarks attributable to
Deinosuchus
in dinosaur bones.)
