Tyrannosaurus rex delivered bone-crushing bites with stiff jaw, research suggests

Researchers say study has produced first-of-its-kind modelling of dinosaur’s jaw

A 67 million year-old skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex pictured at the French National Museum of Natural History in Paris in 2018 (REUTERS)

The tyrannosaurus rex’s bone-crushing bite strength came through keeping a joint in its lower jaw steady like an alligator, rather than a flexible mandible like that of a snake, a new study has suggested.

Paleontologists have long been puzzled over how the dinosaur’s jaw was strong enough to bite through and ingest bone - as fossil evidence showed it did regularly.

Scientists had found that the T. rex had a joint in the middle of their jaws, called the intramandibular joint, which is also present in modern-day reptiles.