The holloywood depictions of Tyrannosaurus rex angrily chasing after its terrified prey have finally been proven accurate. A tell-tale tooth led scientists to believe the behemoth really did hunt down its prey.
A T-rex tooth was found embedded in the back of a herbivorous dinosaur. Scientists determined the wound had healed over and the plant-eater had most likely lived for several years after the initial attack, The Wall Street Journal reported.
"This is smoking-gun evidence that, in fact, Tyrannosaurus did attack animals and did not just go after carrion," Mark Norell, paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, who was not involved in the study, said.
The giant predator is believed to have had an extremely strong bite, able to tear off up to 500 pounds of flesh in one chomp. The fossils show one lucky would-be prey was able to escape.
"The animal was attacked, survived and escaped," said paleontologist David Burnham at the University of Kansas Biodiversity Institute, who helped to analyze the fossil. "Until we found this specimen, people could say that T-rex was a scavenger; here is evidence it attacked living things."
"Whereas previously cited fossil evidence, such as isolated tooth marks, might have been easily misconstrued as the result of scavenging behavior...our specimen includes the identities of the prey animal and the attacker, and the fact that the prey was alive when attacked," researchers wrote in the study, The Daily Mail reported. "Moreover, the position of the injury - the tail - suggests that T-Rex could possibly have engaged in pursuit predation."
The researchers found the position of the tooth to be consistent with modern pursuit-predator's habits, such as lions that often go for the back of their prey.
The tooth was examined using X-ray technology to determine it actually did come from the predatory T-rex.
Some researchers have argued the infamous dinosaur only fed on the dead. Scarring on bones and footprints gave some clues the dinosaur pursued its prey, but there was never a tooth to prove for sure it was the species.
"We see puncture marks and gouges from teeth, but the teeth themselves aren't there," dinosaur expert Thomas Holtz at the University of Maryland said. "There was a lack of positive evidence that Tyrannosaurus rex had done it."
