A team of scientists says the T. rex family looked more like lizards, with scaly lips covering and sealing their mouths when closed.
Your dinosaur probably has a hulking frame, scaly skin, puny arms and protruding teeth it wielded to be the apex predator of its era. Right?
With lips, the T. rex family bears more of a resemblance to Barney, the purple dinosaur from the PBS children’s show. But paleontologists’ interpretation of bones has changed over time. Some of the first depictions of dinosaurs showed them as sluggish, swamp-bound beasts, too big to leave the water for long. Others portrayed dinosaurs like dragons or other mythical medieval creatures.
“What really blows the door open and lets all the lipless dinosaurs in is ‘Jurassic Park,’” Witton said. “The ‘Jurassic Park’ T. rex was so iconic and so influential that from that moment on, that’s what pop culture dinosaurs start to look like.”To figure out whether the actual tyrannosaur lineage had lips or not, the research team turned to a tooth found near the Milk River in Alberta., a close relative of the T.
Whatever their appearance, these dinosaur lips were likely to have lacked muscles, meaning a T. rex wouldn’t be able to snarl and smile like humans and other mammals.When reconstructing a prehistoric animal, “the closest relatives are usually an okay model,” Cullen said. But birds don’t have teeth at all, making them a poor point of comparison. And crocodiles are built for swimming and sensing movements in water.
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