A typical hard-head.
Pachycephalosaurus can’t even stick to one side of the diet charts after the most complete Pachycephalosuaurs fossil ever has been found, showing suspiciously ‘steak knife-like’ teeth.
The 15-foot-long dome-headed dinosaur that lived during the Jurassic period and was one of the original stars showcased in the 1997 film Jurassic Park: The Lost World has astonished scientists who were shown the most complete jaw and set of teeth yet found for the species in a Paleontology meeting in Albuquerque New Mexico earlier this week.
Previously, the Pachycephalosaurus was thought to shred rough plant matter, fruits and seeds with sharp teeth found at the back of its jaw in already found fossils. But with this new discovery, showing sharp, blades like teeth at the front of its jaw.
It’s unclear if this is a sign of temporary teeth found in youth or not.
Steve Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh in the U.K. and Ottawa, Illinois native, discussed the find at the meeting in Albuquerque.
“I’ve studied [carnivorous] theropods for 15 years, and I’m pretty sure if you handed me a tooth-like that, I would say that’s a theropod tooth,” he says in an interview with National Geographic. “It had the combination of a beak with these very sharp, steak knife-like serrated teeth … They must have been eating some kind of meat. Why else would you have steak knives at the front of your mouth?”
The new find was showcased by Mark Goodwin of the University of California Museum of Paleontology in Berkeley. Goodwin’s last presentation that caused so much controversy was a set of two junior Pachycephalosaurus that are now known and widely accepted in the scientific community as Stygimoloch and Dracorex.
