Most likely, some species of dinosaurs were cannibals, according to a study carried out by scientists at the University of London and the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Alberta (Canada), who found bite marks in fossilized bones of the skull of a Daspletosaurus , belonging to to the tyrannosaurus family.
The research, published in the magazine PeerJ , points out that the Daspletosaurus not only fought fierce battles with their congeners, but that the survivors of the fighting ate the corpses of the dead. This is what is deduced from the analysis of the bites that the fossils presented. The authors of the research, David Hone and Darren Tanke, studied the remains of a Daspletosaurus that had been discovered in 1994 in Canada’s Dinosaur Provincial Park.
An unhealed wound in the bone of the lower jaw makes experts suspect that this great predator was eaten after death. But the most important thing is that, by the traces that have been left, it is appreciated that it was the victim of another Daspletosaurus . This is a tentative interpretation, but other researchers had previously detected traces of cannibalism in other tyrannosaurs.
For David Hone, the animal they analyzed “obviously had a hard life and suffered numerous head injuries, some of which must have been fatal. The one that caused them was probably a member of the same species, which suggests between these dinosaurs there were fierce fights “. Daspletosaurus are included, like Tyrannosaurus rex , in the Tyrannosaurus family, which were carnivorous dinosaurs with huge heads, massive bodies, and short arms. Also in the case of T. rex , signs of cannibalism were found.
