T. Rex Tooth Serves as Proof: 'Jurassic Park' Was Right About the Predators (VIDEO)
Its official- the big, scary, short armed, sharp-toothed dinosaur that often plays the bad guy in films like "Jurassic Park" was definitely a bad guy. Pointing to evidence recovered from a fossil, researchers say they can now verify that the T. Rex was a predator.
More formally known as the Tyrannosaurus Rex, although friends may just call him T-Rex, the controversy over whether the dinosaur was a predator is no joking matter. Scientists have argued for years without solid proof that the T-Rex was a hunter who went after his prey.
"You see 'Jurassic Park,' and you see T. rex as this massive hunter and killer, as incredibly vicious. But scientists have argued for 100 years that he was too big and too slow to hunt prey and that he was probably a scavenger, an animal that feeds only on dead things," University of Kansas paleontologist David Burnham told CNN.
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Theory over the T. Rex being a predator was put to the test after a recent discovery by researcher Robert DePalma.
"It's too late for your patient," doctors told DePalma after running a CT scan at the local hospital of a duckbill dinosaur's tail. Lodged in the tail was a tooth. DNA evidence has linked that tooth to the expected perpetrator, the T. Rex.
"We were giddy like school kids," DePalma told CNN. "This now returns T. rex as a predator. So the monsters that we see in dinosaurs are real. They did go chasing after things, kill them and eat them. They actively pursued live prey."
The proof is in the pudding, says University of Kansas paleontologist David Burnham-- or the tail, that is.
"Our evidence is new because we have a T. rex tooth inside a duckbill dinosaur, that bit it so hard and so viciously that the tooth broke off, the duckbill dinosaur got away, and over the next few years, the wound healed," Burnham explained.
