I will eat ANYTHING, bitches!
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  • "I will eat ANYTHING, bitches!"
"T. rex doesn't want to be fed. He wants to hunt. Can't just suppress 65 million years of gut instinct." —Dr. Allan Grant, Jurassic Park

For decades there has seemed to be a debate about whether T. rex was a predator or a scavenger. The fact is that many predators are scavengers from time to time out of necessity, so the debate—though popular with the public and media—isn't really a debate at all.

However this week has brought joyful news to those concerned for T. rex's fierce reputation: Researchers have discovered a Tyrannosaur tooth lodged between the vertebrae of a hadrosaur, a duck-billed herbivore. Couldn't that just be the result of scavenging?

Scans of the tooth and two surrounding tail vertebrae showed clear signs of bone healing around the wound, taken as proof that the hadrosaur was alive at the time of the attack and survived for several months or even years afterwards.

"This is unambiguous evidence that T. rex was an active predator," the authors write in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "Such evidence is rare in the fossil record for good reason – prey rarely escapes."


Frankly the discovery is super cool without the scavenger vs. predator debate. For an excellent overview of the non-troversy, head over to NationalGeographic.com where Brian Switek discusses it at length. An interesting tidbit: Rockstar paleontologist Jack Horner, who is famous for many things but among them his assertion that T. rex was a scavenger, didn't even really commit to the idea:

Not that even Horner himself took the claims of T. rex as an obligate scavenger seriously. “I’m not convinced that T. rex was only a scavenger,” Horner wrote in The Complete T. rex, “though sometimes I will say so sometimes just to be contrary and get my colleagues arguing.”


Yep, Horner's been trolling everyone.

More on the discovery here, here and here.