Research suggests Alberta’s dinosaurs fought each other
Teeth marks on tyrannosaur’s skull, jaw damage came from same species
They’re well known as the most dangerous dinosaur — and new research suggests tyrannosaurs were involved in both combat and cannibalism.
The study, published Thursday in the journal PeerJ, shows the skull of a type of tyrannosaur called Daspletosaurus — found in Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta in the early 1990s — suffered numerous injuries during its life.
Daspletosaurus was a large carnivore that lived in Canada and was only a little smaller than its wellknown cousin, the tyrannosaur. It’s believed it was an active predator and scavenger.
“The animal in question is what we call a sub- adult,” said David Hone, co- author of the paper and a lecturer in zoology at Queen Mary University of London in the United Kingdom. “It’s not really a baby, but it’s not really fully mature. Its human equivalent would be a teenager, 15 or 16.
“Basically it’s got a number of different injuries on the skull.”
Researchers found numerous injuries, including one bite to the back of the head that broke off the back of the skull and left a tooth-puncture through to the bone.
Hone said some of those bites came from other big tyrannosaurs.
Although there’s no evidence the animal died from that injury, there’s damage to the jaw bones that suggest a large dinosaur — potentially the same species — bit into the jaws, broke them and likely ate some of the animal after it died.
“You’ve got some post- mortem scavenging event, quite possibly cannibalism,” said Hone.
The specimen, which is at the Royal Tyrrell Museum, was found in 1994 by Philip Currie, who’s now a professor at the University of Alberta.
He could not be reached for comment.
Darren Tanke, a Royal Tyrrell researcher who excavated the specimen over a number of years and co- authored the paper, wasn’t able to speak about his research because there’s a protocol restricting provincial employees from doing interviews during the Alberta election campaign.
Hone said the research adds to a growing body of research showing tyrannosaurs fought each other and ate each other.
“But, if you are going to piece together fossil ecosystems — behaviour ecology of something that has been dead for hundreds of millions of years — one- off specimens or even two or three specimens get you only so far,” he said. “When you’ve got several incidents of that, it starts to look like something that was not necessarily common ... but certainly not a complete outlier.”
It is also a unique record with evidence of both pre- and postmortem injuries to an individual.