A T. Rex Left Its Tooth in a Dinosaur's Face (65 Million Years Ago!)

The lamp in Professor Pip's laboratory glowed warm and amber. On his big wooden workbench sat a huge, ancient dinosaur skull — long and duck-billed, with a mouth full of flat plant-chewing teeth.

Mia, Leo, and their friend Beatrix leaned in. Pip adjusted his crooked spectacles, held up his magnifying glass, and gestured to the fossil's nose.

"Detectives," he whispered, "we have a Cretaceous crime scene."

Right in the bone was a huge, curved, broken TOOTH — nearly the length of a banana.

"Oh my whiskers," said Beatrix. "Is that — ?"

"A Tyrannosaurus rex tooth," said Pip. "And it's stuck. Right. In. Its. Nose."

"WHOA," said Leo.

Pip's tail curled. "This poor Edmontosaurus — a friendly plant-eater with a beak like a duck — met a T. rex 65 million years ago. Detectives, what does this tooth tell us?"

Mia squinted. "That the T. rex bit it in the FACE?"

"Precisely! And here's what's clever." Pip pulled two small toys from his pocket — a plastic banana and a chunky wooden block. He smooshed the banana with the block. The block bounced off unharmed. Then he grabbed a pencil and pressed the tip against the block. CRRRACK! The pencil tip snapped off, stuck in the wood.

"To snap a tooth clean off in bone," Pip said, "takes a tremendous amount of force. Force is a push or a pull. And this bite was a giant push! We know because the tooth broke, and the tooth stayed. That means T. rex bit down HARD — with force scientists measure in pounds, and it's more than any other land animal alive today."

"So it was hunting?" asked Beatrix, quietly.

"Maybe," said Pip. "Or maybe it found the Edmontosaurus already resting and had a big scavenger snack. The clue is in the bone: it didn't have time to heal. When you scrape your knee, your skin grows back and looks a little different. This bone never did that — so the bite happened right at the end, or after."

"Oh!" said Mia. "Like when I found a broken cookie in the jar and figured out my little brother did it because his hand still had crumbs?"

"Exactly right!" said Pip, delighted. "That's what a paleontologist does — they read the story an animal left behind, one bone at a time. This fossil is 65 million years old, and today, we cracked the case."

He looked up at his shelves of fossils and rocks, a whole silent history sitting on wood. "Every stone has a story, my detectives. What's the story you'll read tomorrow?"