A fossil housed at Montana State University’s Museum of the Rockies is offering scientists a rare look at how Tyrannosaurus may have hunted. The specimen includes a tyrannosaur tooth still embedded in the skull of another dinosaur, according to ScienceDaily.
The skull was found in 2005 in the Hell Creek Formation of eastern Montana on land managed by the Bureau of Land Management. It is a nearly complete Edmontosaurus skull and is now part of the museum’s paleontology collection, where the embedded tooth stands out immediately.
Researchers from Montana State University and the University of Alberta studied the fossil and published their findings in PeerJ. By comparing the tooth with those of meat-eating dinosaurs from the Hell Creek Formation and using CT scans, they identified the tooth as belonging to Tyrannosaurus.
Scientists say the fossil preserves evidence of a direct encounter between predator and prey. The skull shows no healing around the tooth, and the tooth’s position suggests the Edmontosaurus may have faced its attacker head-on, according to the researchers quoted by ScienceDaily.
