Tyrannosaurus probably had lips, study finds – 03/31/2023 – Science

“Jurassic Park” and the toy makers are wrong. O tyrannosaurus rex He probably didn’t have jagged teeth sticking out like we’d been led to believe, but rather lips, according to a study published Thursday.

That’s the conclusion of a team of international researchers, whose findings were reported by the journal Science.

Animals like T. rex, theropod dinosaurs, most likely had some kind of labia, like soft tissue that covered their mouths to protect their teeth, according to Thomas Cullen, one of the study’s authors.

Until now, these animals were thought to be more like “crocodiles, with teeth exposed when the mouth is closed and no lips,” explains Cullen, a professor of paleobiology at Auburn University.

Their conclusions are not definitive, but Cullen and other researchers have examined theropods from various museums and followed different lines of study.

They observed, for example, the wear of tooth enamel in dinosaurs and crocodiles, the living animals most similar to theropods.

“Enamel, as dentists tell some people, needs to be kept healthy and hydrated to be healthy,” explained Cullen. “If it’s exposed to the air too long, it becomes brittle, it’s more likely to crack or get sick.”

According to the paleobiologist, the enamel on the outside of the teeth of living crocodiles wears out faster than on the inside, as they don’t have lips.

“When we look at the thickness of the enamel on the inside and outside of the teeth of large tyrannosaurs, it doesn’t show this configuration like a crocodile,” he said, but a model “more like an animal that has lips (…) The thickness of the enamel is the same on the external and internal side”.

The researchers wanted to know if the teeth of tyrannosaurus rex they were so big that they couldn’t fit in the dinosaur’s mouth and compared them to various lizards with lips.

Some of these lizards have such large teeth that “it seems almost unbelievable that these teeth could be completely covered by the lips, and yet they are,” Cullen said. “And we found that (…) this scaling relationship is almost identical in theropod dinosaurs.”

Cullen acknowledges that the famous “Jurassic Park” movie reflected what science knew at the time it was produced, but has since “strayed wildly” in its attempts to accurately represent these dinosaurs.