WASHINGTON : Tyrannosaurus rex possessed awe-inspiring bite force, with the huge meat-eating dinosaur's bone-crunching chomp estimated to pack about 8,000 pounds of might - about equal to the weight of three small cars.
"High bite forces and loads during feeding need to be accommodated by the skull and lower jaw," said paleontologist Stephan Lautenschlager of the University of Birmingham in England, author of the research published in the journal Communications Biology https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-022-03706-0.
It turned out that once a theropod species attained a skull length of about three feet or more, the shape of its eye sockets had become elliptical or keyhole-shaped. Juveniles of these big meat-eaters had circular eye sockets, with the change in shape unfolding as the animal matured into adulthood.