Was Tyrannosaurus rex a cowardly scavenger or the fearsome predator portrayed in Jurassic Park? It’s hotly contested in palaeobiology circles. Now one thing seems certain: the most famous dinosaur of all was a cannibal.
Nicholas Longrich of Yale University was examining °Õ.Ìý¸é±ð³æ bones for signs that mammals had gnawed on them when he found that four bones bore large tooth marks that could only have been made by another big predatory dinosaur.
All four come from western North America and date from the last 5 million years of the dinosaur era. °Õ.Ìý°ù±ð³æ was the only predator around at the time that was large enough to leave the marks, says Longrich – so the most likely explanation is that the toothy giant was a cannibal.
Big eaters
of Montana State University in Bozeman, who was not involved in the study, agrees. “It seems very unlikely that a second large species has gone undetected,” he says, because North American fossil beds have been thoroughly investigated.
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Longrich says cannibalism was probably common in predatory dinosaurs, just as modern large carnivores, including , komodo dragons and some big cats, often turn cannibal.
“T. rex is the second dinosaur for which we have evidence of cannibalism,” says of the University of Maryland in College Park: in 2003, a study revealed that the Madagascan predator Majungasaurus was also a cannibal.
Journal reference: , DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0013419
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