Allosaurus europaeus VS Ceratosaurus dentisulcatus

Dec 29, 2013 21:05:22 GMT thesporerex said:

There is no evidence for ceratosaurus having a stronger bite, just because it has a bigger skull and bigger teeth.

Actually, there is...

A study conducted by Ralph E. Molnar earlier this year titled A Comparative Analysis of Reconstructed Jaw Musculature and Mechanics of Some Large Theropods examined the skulls and jaw musculature of Tyrannosaurus rex, Daspletosaurus torosus, Nanotyrannus lancensis (i.e. juvenile Rex), Allosaurus fragilis, and Ceratosaurus nasicornis. He found out that T. rex and D. torosus were similar in overall muscular anatomy and probably had a similar bite force at the same size. For Nano, he found out that the skull was a lot weaker that other tyrannosaurids, further supporting the idea baby tyrannosaurs had weak bites before maturity. He found while the arrangement of the muscles of A. fragilis were similar to T. rex, A. fragilis had a much lower lever to it's jaw, suggesting it had a much weaker bite, but that it had an the capability for an impressive gape.

Finally, the results for C. nasicornis were actually quite shocking. In the abstract, he says that:

The lever arms of C. nasicornis are reasonably similar to those of tyrannosaurids, suggesting that both had stronger bites than A. fragilis.

Thus, proving Ceratosaurus had a stronger bite than Allosaurus. However, in the actual paper Molnar says something even more interesting that caught my attention:

Ceratosaurus exhibits a generally greater level of mechanical efficiency of the jaw abductors than the tyrannosaurids. This, combined with an abductor chamber apparently relatively larger than in Allosaurus (and Daspletosaurus), suggests that Ceratosaurus had a more lethal bite than Allosaurus and, possibly, than some tyrannosaurids.

Note that this applies to individuals with skulls scaled to the same size. Either way though, that means that Ceratosaurus possibly had a stronger bite than some similarly-sized tyrannosaurids, which is pretty damn impressive seeing as Ceratosaurus is always portrayed as the underdog to Allosaurus. It truth Ceratosaurus had the biting and crushing advantage over the weaker-jawed Allosaurus, and as Scott Hartman's illustrations show, it was bulkier too.

When you get to the heart of things, Ceratosaurus was basically just an early prototype tyrannosaur...