How Powerful Was a T. rex Bite?

You need look no further than the enormous jagged teeth on a Tyrannosaurus rex to know its mouth was no place you wanted to end up. But the question for T. rex researchers is: Just how much crushing force could the jaws of this creature create?

Scientists at Liverpool University in the U.K. released a study this week in Biology Letters that estimated the biting force of T. rex may have been able to deliver 12,8000 pounds of force?almost 20 times more powerful than previously thought. Researchers used computer modeling to produce digital sculptures of the dinosaur?s muscles, which the scientists then used to estimate the biting power.

The Method

Karl Bates and his team from Liverpool faced the same problem as the researchers, covered by PM last week, who wanted to model how huge dinosaurs like the Brachiosaurus moved. Namely, while many dinosaur skeletons survived to the modern day thanks to fossilization, muscles and other soft tissues did not. Without any record of muscles to go on, the researchers based their reconstructions on the muscular structures of crocodiles and birds, which share a common ancestor with dinosaurs (albeit separated by hundreds of millions of years).

When Bates and his team used the modeling method on living animals, they found that their lab method came up with jaw-power estimates that were within 5 to 20 percent what the animals could actually produce (they included this range in the final estimates for the T. rex). Muscles of the same size can generate different amounts of force depending on their contracting properties, so the researchers simply used an average muscle force across all skeletal vertebrates in their research.

The Bite

Previous studies had estimated that a T. rex could produce between 1800 and 3000 pounds of force, but Bates and his team estimate that a T. rex?s jaw could deliver between 4500 and 12,800 pounds of total force. A jaw exerts the greater force near the hinge than the front?you can bite down harder with your molars than your front teeth. The broad range in Bates?s numbers accounts for both that and the researchers? margin of error.

If Bates and his team are correct, then the T. rex would have had the greatest bite of any terrestrial creature ever known to walk the Earth. Even at the conservative end of the team?s estimate a T. rex would have eight times the biting power of a lion, five times that of a hyena, and two times that of a crocodile. The only known animal that could top T. rex is the extinct gigantic shark C. Megalodon, which may have been able to bite with 41,000 pounds of force.

The Controversy

Bates says this was the first time computer models have been used to estimate the biting power of a T. rex. "There hasn?t been a lot of scientific work in this area," he says. "Although we are saying we got higher estimates than the previous, the previous estimates were not that extensive."

Previous studies extrapolated the biting power and body mass of animals still alive to estimate the T. rex?s biting power. Bates says these studies are flawed because they couldn?t use animals larger than 450 pounds?it?s too large of a jump up to the size of the 15,000-pound T. rex to trust those results, he says. Another study used T. rex bite marks preserved in a fossil to measure the biting force, but because the T. rex might have easily not been biting as hard as possible, Bates says, those estimates could also be too conservative.

Bates wasn?t comfortable weighing in on whether or not a T. rex could really tear apart a Jeep as in Jurassic Park. But it?s safe to say you wouldn?t want to find yourself up against a T. rex?s jaws.

Source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/how-powerful-was-a-t-rex-bite-7050224?src=rss

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