Not simply tiny arms: T. rex additionally had tremendous small eyes to accommodate its large chew

The highly effective jaws of Tyrannosaurus rex snapped along with such power that they’d splinter the bones of the dinosaur’s prey. However to realize such a strong chew, the king of the dinosaurs needed to make an evolutionary trade-off: It needed to accept smaller eyes.

Primarily based on an evaluation of 410 fossilized reptile specimens from the Mesozoic interval (252 to 66 million years in the past), a scientist concluded that T. rex and different flesh-eaters of comparable ilk advanced smaller, narrower eyes over time, more likely to compensate for his or her bites changing into increasingly more forceful. Particularly, carnivores with skulls longer than 3.2 toes (1 meter) tended to have elongated, keyhole-like eye sockets — or orbits — as adults, whereas the carnivores’ younger offspring and herbivores of all ages had round eye sockets.