Conjure up an image of Tyrannosaurus rex in a Hollywood blockbuster. The meat-eating dinosaur’s long, serrated teeth taper to sharp points that protrude from a gaping maw bared wide in a roar. As the predator closes those jaws around its prey, its upper teeth remain exposed in a fanged smile.
But new research is challenging these popular-culture depictions. The teeth of T. rex and its two-legged, three-toed meat-eating kin—known as theropods—were likely covered by thin, scaly lips resembling those of some modern lizards, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science.
“We’re basically still living in the era of what ‘Jurassic Park’ established back in 1993,” said Mark Witton, a paleontologist and paleoartist from the University of Portsmouth and co-author of the new study.
For the new study, the group compared the tooth-size-to-skull-length relationship in more than 20 theropod specimens from museum and research-institution collections to those in various living and extinct lizard species. Even though the dinosaur teeth and skulls were ultimately bigger, the skull-tooth size relationship among the theropods closely resembled that observed in modern-day monitor lizards, such as Komodo dragons, that have covered teeth.
