STL Science Center

STL Science Center

09 September 2020

Toothless in Death

Skull of Qianzhousaurus sinensis: top – lateral view, middle – dorsal view, bottom – ventral view. Scale bar – 5 cm. Image credit: Junchang Lü et al. Retrieved from Sci-News on 9-9-20

It is not weird to find fossil teeth. It is not weird to find fossil jaws (mandibles, lower jaws, or maxillae, upper jaws). It is not even strange to find fossil jaws with few teeth or many broken teeth. It may be a little alarming, then, to see the skull of Qianzhousaurus and notice it has no fossil teeth. The teeth The team describing the fossil describes long narrow and thin teeth. They based their conclusions off of comparisons of relatives of Qianzhousaurus (both Alioramus species). Some inferences may have been drawn from the shape of the alveoli (the "sockets" of the teeth in the bone) but this is not expressly stated in the paper that describes Qianzhousaurus. The number of alveoli, and therefore teeth, is described in the paper and constitutes some of the differences that the authors use to make the case for this dinosaur being a unique genus and species as opposed to a larger member of the Alioramus genus. There are 18 teeth in the mandible (Tyrannosaurus rex, the author's common comparison species, possesses up to 17 teeth here), 15 in the maxilla, and 4 in the premaxilla. That is a total of 37 teeth. But we have to remember there are two sides to the head, which means there are 74 teeth in the skull of Qianzhousaurus (providing my math checks out).

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