Terrible Teens Of T. Rex
In a new scientific paper, researchers from Northern Illinois University and the Burpee Museum of Natural History in Rockford report that adolescent tyrannosaurs got into some serious scraps with their peers.
The evidence can be found on Jane, the museum's prized juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex, discovered in 2001 in Montana.
Jane's fossils show that she sustained a serious bite that punctured through the bone of the dinosaur's left upper jaw and snout in four places, the researchers report. The injury wasn't life threatening and eventually healed over, according to the scientists. The bite did leave scars, however.
"Jane has what we call a boxer's nose," says Joe Peterson, an NIU Ph.D. candidate in geology and lead author of the study published in the November issue of the journal Palaios. "Her snout bends slightly to the left. It was probably broken and healed back crooked."
The researchers determined that another juvenile tyrannosaur was responsible for the injury.
"Only a few animals could have inflicted the wound," Peterson says, noting that the bite marks were oblong-shaped. A crocodile or an adult T. rex would have left different types of bite marks.
"When we looked at the jaw and teeth of Jane, we realized her bite would have produced a very close match to the injuries on her own face," Peterson says. "That leads us to believe she was attacked by a member of the same species that was about the same age. Because the wound had healed, we think this happened when Jane was possibly a few years younger."
Peterson and Mike Henderson, curator of earth sciences at the Burpee Museum and also a Ph.D. candidate in geology at NIU, were members of the museum group that unearthed the pristine dinosaur skeleton. NIU Presidential Research Professor Reed Scherer, also among the new study's authors, worked as an adviser on the find.
"Young tyrannosaurs did serious battle against each other. (Credit: Illustration by Erica Lyn Schmidt)"
Source: Northern Illinois University
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