Study Shows Tyronaurus Rex Had Lips

Jurassic Park and the toy makers are wrong. He tyrannosaurus rex He probably didn’t have jagged protruding teeth, as we’ve been led to believe, but rather lips, according to a study released Thursday.

This conclusion was reached by a group of international researchers, the results of which were published in the journal The science.

“Animals like t rex, dinosaurs Theropods most likely had some kind of lips, a kind of soft tissue that covers the mouth to protect the teeth, says one of the study’s authors, Thomas Cullen.

So far, it has been assumed that these animals are more like crocodileswith bared teeth when the mouth was closed and no lips,” explains this professor of paleobiology at Auburn University.

Their conclusions are not definitive, but Cullen and other researchers studied theropods from various museums and explored several avenues.

Key in the teeth

They observed, for example, the wear of tooth enamel in dinosaurs And crocodilesliving animals most similar to theropods.

“We did this because enamel, as some dentists say, needs to stay healthy and hydrated to be healthy,” Cullen explained. “If it’s exposed to air for too long, it becomes brittle, more likely to crack or get sick.”

According to the paleobiologist, the enamel on the outside of the teeth of living crocodiles is erased faster than on the inside, because they do not have lips.

“When we look at the thickness of the enamel inside and outside of the teeth in large tyrannosaurs, they don’t have the same configuration as a crocodile,” he said, but “a more animal pattern with lips.” “The thickness of the enamel is the same on the outside and inside.”

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

Some lizards have teeth so huge that “it seems almost unbelievable that these teeth can be completely covered by the lips, and yet they are,” Cullen said.

“And we found that (…) this scale ratio is almost identical in dinosaurs theropods,” he added.

Cullen admits that the famous film “Jurassic Park”conforms to what science knew when it was filmed, but it has since gone ‘a little off the rails’ in trying to accurately portray these dinosaurs.

AFP