Dinosaurs' eye socket shapes vary depending on their bite force.
The powerful jaws of Tyrannosaurus rex snapped together with such force that they would splinter the bones of the dinosaur's prey. But to gain such a powerful bite, the king of the dinosaurs had to make an evolutionary trade-off: It had to settle for smaller eyes.
The new research, published Thursday in the journal Communications Biology , lends support to the idea that the brain and sensory organs, such as the eyes, must adapt to accommodate animals' primary feeding strategies, Walsh told Live Science in an email. And in the case of T. rex, that feeding strategy centered around a bone-crushing bite.For his analysis, the study's author Stephan Lautenschlager, a vertebrate palaeontologist at the University of Birmingham in the U.K.
Juvenile specimens of some of these carnivores — including T. rex and T. bataar — suggested that the dinos developed these squashed eye sockets in adulthood, whereas they retained circular sockets in their youth."Obviously we don't have growth series for many species, but for the ones we have, for me this makes the case much stronger that the reason for the shape variation we see is related to feeding," Walsh noted. So as a young T.
These models revealed that, during a simulated bite, keyhole-shaped eye sockets deformed far less than the circular ones because they directed the force of the bite toward robust bones behind the eye socket."The keyhole shape reduces and redirects stresses in the skull during bite a lot better than a circular orbit would," Lautenschlager said."This is clearly an adaptation found in many large carnivores across different groups. Something that evolved independently.