A T-Rex With Plenty to Say

About this drawing

Picture a roaring T-Rex and the first thing you see is that mouth, which makes sense because its bite is the real headline. Tyrannosaurus rex lived about 66 million years ago in what is now western North America, from Montana to Texas, and it ranks among the hardest-biting land animals ever found.

Each tooth was roughly banana-sized, thick and serrated like a steak knife. Those teeth did more than slice. They could crush bone, and scientists have the receipts: fossil bones with T-Rex bite marks, plus fossilized droppings packed with bone fragments.

The secret was muscle. Massive jaw muscles anchored at the back of a wide skull let this predator clamp down far harder than any living alligator. Its forward-facing eyes likely helped it judge distance, too, which is handy when dinner is trying to get away.

So did it actually roar? Nobody knows for sure, because sounds don't fossilize. Some researchers suspect the big dinosaur made deep, closed-mouth booms closer to what alligators and some birds do today. That would be less of a movie scream and more of a rumble you could feel in your chest. Honestly, that may be even scarier.

• dinosaurs
• t-rex
• predators
• cretaceous