As you have probably never suspected, there is a right way, and a wrong way, to go about eating Triceratops. Since Triceratops have been extinct for, oh, 65 million years (give or take), we haven't been able to do much in the way of culinary experimentin' on them. But Tyrannosaurus had millions of years, and we've now learned its secrets.
It's fairly common for paleontologists to find Tyrannosaurus bite marks on Triceratopsbones, but nobody had ever taken a comprehensive look at lots of different bite-scarred bones all at once until Denver Fowler from the Museum of the Rockies did and published his results in the latest issue of Nature.
Examining 18 Triceratops specimens with T. rex tooth marks on them (most of which were skuls) Fowler and his colleagues discovered lots of puncture and pull marks on the Triceratops neck frills. That would be, the big frilly thing you can see at the back of this skull:
It's big, yes, but there wouldn't have been a lot of meat on there: it's mostly bone, skin, and some cartilage. Closer inspection showed that the bite marks left grooves, indicating that rather than eating the frill, the T. rex was grabbing onto it and jerking it, probably to reposition the head of its meal to get at the tasty and nutritious neck muscles underneath. And obviously, the easiest way to do this (as the researchers explain) was to just pull the head clean off, using the frill for leverage. Additional tooth marks inside the ball-socket head-neck joint seem to confirm this, while other marks indicate that T. rex probably enjoyed delicately nibbling on Triceratops faces. Yum!
For a step-by-step illustrated guide that you can paste on your fridge. ILLUSTRATIONS
Via Nature
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