T. Rex Bite worse Than Previously Thought

Chances are that you wouldn’t have survived a T. Rex bite anyway, but new research suggests that the Tyrannosaurus Rex had a much stronger bite than previously thought. The T. Rex bite is believed to be stronger than any other land animal.

Study researcher Karl Bates, of the University of Liverpool, said in a statement:

“Our results show that the T. Rex had an extremely powerful bite, making it one of the most dangerous predators to have roamed our planet.”

The researchers said that the T. Rex didn’t develop its powerful bite until later in life. According to Bates, this means that there was less competition between generations of T. Rex.

Bates and his team created a computer model of the dinosaur’s jaw to estimate the force of its bite. According to the study, the T. Rex’s back teeth would have generated about 10,000 pounds of force, which would be akin to an elephant sitting on you.

Bates said:

“We took what we knew about T. Rex from its skeleton and built a computer model/ We then asked the computer model to produce a bite so that we could measure the speed and force of it directly.”

Peter Falkingham, of the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, said that in order to understand the magnitude of the T. Rex’s bite you have to look at modern animals. Falkingham told Live Science:

“If you consider that the lion and alligator [bite strength] are so much lower (as reported in our paper), and think of what they can bite through, that can give you a sense of the power in a T. Rex bite. Such a powerful bite may have enabled T.Rex to crush large bones.”