Artistic rendering of a newly discovered species of parrot-beaked dinosaur, Psittacosaurus gobiensis. Psittacosaurs evolved their strong-jawed, nut-eating habits 60 million years before the earliest parrot.
Credit: Todd Marshall
Different positions of the jaw would have been ideal for cropping, shelling and crushing nuts, the researchers believe. “It shows another remarkable solution to chewing invented by dinosaurs. It remains to be seen if any animals do it today. It is just a remarkable thing, to find a new chewing mechanism that is neither up and down nor fore and aft,” said Sereno.
Alex Cook, senior curator of palaeontology at the Queensland Museum, in Brisbane, said the find was interesting but not surprising. “It shows that where there is a niche to fill, something will evolve to fill it,” he said.
Cook added that a computer-tomography scan to work out the bite force of the skull would help to confirm what the dinosaur used its bite for. “This group had [rigid] skulls to maintain maximum force. It would have been nice to get a model of the force behaviour,” he said.
Sereno said that his team was currently sending the skull for a CT scan for that purpose. “We will reconstruct the estimated volume of jaw muscle and then calculate the force… I think they had quite a bite!”
Follow Cosmos on Twitter!
twitter.com/cosmosmagazine
