Tseng, Peterson and graduate student Shannon Brink of East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina, will publish their findings this week in the journal It is just adding more to that full picture of how animals like tyrannosaurs lived and grew and the roles that they played in that ecosystem.” It allows us to get a better idea of how they are feeding, what they are eating. “Are they already crushing bone? No, but they are puncturing it. “This actually gives us a little bit of a metric to help us gauge how quickly the bite force is changing from juvenile to adulthood, and something to compare with how the body is changing during that same period of time,” said Peterson, a professor at the University of Wisconsin in Oshkosh and a paleopathologist - a specialist on the injuries and deformities visible in fossil skeletons. , while not yet able to crush bones like their 30- or 40-year-old parents, were developing their biting techniques and strengthening their jaw muscles to be able do so once their adult teeth came in. “By really refining our estimates of juvenile bite force, we can more succinctly place them in a part of the food web and think about how they may have played the role of a different kind of predator from their larger, adult parents.” “If you are up to almost 6,000 newtons of bite force, that places them in a slightly different weight class,” said Tseng, UC Berkeley assistant professor of integrative biology. Why does it matter? Bite force measurements can help paleontologists understand the ecosystem in which dinosaurs - or any extinct animal - lived, which predators were powerful enough to eat which prey, and what other predators they competed with. Jack Tseng measuring punctures produced in a cow bone by a metal cast of a tyrannosaur tooth. were considerably less, about 4,000 newtons. based on reconstruction of the jaw muscles or from mathematically scaling down the bite force of adult Previous bite force estimates for juvenile about 35,000 newtons - or to the puny biting power of humans: 300 newtons. , mounted it on a mechanical testing frame commonly used in engineering and materials science, and tried to crack a cow legbone with it.īased on 17 successful attempts to match the depth and shape of the bite marks on the fossils - he had to toss out some trials because the fresh bone slid around too much - he determined that a juvenile could have exerted up to 5,641 newtons of force, somewhere between the jaw forces exerted by a hyena and a crocodile.Ĭompare that to the bite force of an adult Last year, he and Peterson made a metal replica of a scimitar-shaped tooth of a 13-year-old juvie , Tseng decided to try to replicate the bite marks and measure how hard those kids could actually chomp down. Jack Tseng loves bone-crunching animals - hyenas are his favorite - so when paleontologist Joseph Peterson discovered fossilized dinosaur bones that had teeth marks from a juvenile (UC Berkeley video by Roxanne Makasdjian and Jeremy Snowden, with footage courtesy of Jack Tseng) rexes and what the findings tell us about the lifestyle of the teenage tyrannosaur. rex, explains his research on juvenile T. Jack Tseng, seen peering through openings in the skull of an adult T.
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