Despite the predatory power wielded by tyrannosaurs, they could be quite delicate with their jaws when they wanted to. Although often cast as indiscriminate bonecrushers, tyrannosaurs could be quite judicious with their bites.
Scientists recently found bite marks on the nearly complete skeleton of a large hadrosaur (right) excavated from the Gobi Desert that were likely punctures and scratches likely made by the eastern cousin of Tyrannosaurus called Tarbosaurus (above). In a bit of fossil forensics, paleontologists David Hone of the Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Palaeoanthropology in Beijing and Mahito Watabe Hayashibara Museum of Natural Sciences in Okayama, Japan determined that the hadrosaur was dead and mostly buried when the Tarbosaurus happened upon it, with just a few parts of its body sticking up above ground.
Rather than chomp through the protruding limb bones and bolting them down, however, the Tarbosaurus used several different bite angles to strip the remaining muscle off the left arm of the hadrosaur, leaving behind a series of scratches and pits. The results appear June 29 in the journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica.
Images: 1) Tarbosaurus/Matt van Rooijen. 2) Close-up of bite marks on the on distal end of hadrosaur bone from the Maastrichtian Bugin Tsav locality in Mongolia. Black arrows indicate deep gouges that penetrate the cortex on the end of the bone. White arrows indicate deep puncture marks on the surface of the bone. /David W. E. Hone.
Source From Great Site: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/08/dinosaur-arsenal-gallery/3/#ixzz0x7rIIzac
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