Tyrannosaurus Rex statue in Glasgow (Photo by Thomas Nugent)

Dear Readers, New Scientist is a very serious magazine, as we know, but this week I was delighted to see the following front-page headline:

Why Dinosaurs Had Lips.

Why had I never thought of this? I’ve grown up with Jurassic Park and the sight of toothy carnivorous dinosaurs chasing Jeff Goldblum in a jeep.

Photo by Jeff Buck, from an exhibit at Chester Zoo

But it appears that we were wrong, wrong, wrong. Mark Witton, a scientist at the University of Portsmouth in the UK, has been researching reptile teeth (like you do), including living creatures such as alligators, and extinct therapod dinosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus Rex and those pesky velociraptors. Apparently, it all comes down to wear and tear on the teeth.

Teeth that are always exposed to the air tend to wear out more quickly, not just because teeth kept inside the mouth are protected from physical damage, but also because saliva is protective – teeth that dry out tend to become more brittle and easily damaged.

In alligators, some teeth are exposed, and these seem to have a lot of the enamel worn away.

Chinese Alligator showing its gnashers (Photo By Greg Hume – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17568635)

However, the teeth of dinosaurs are usually in excellent condition, and Witton suggests that this is incompatible with them being on display all the time – he suspects that, like many predatory lizards, T.Rex and co were more lippy than toothy.

A rather lippy T.Rex swallowing a young Edmontosaurus (Image by Mark P. Witton, from https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/mar/30/tyrannosaurus-t-rex-had-lips-over-teeth-research)

But will Hollywood change its depiction of dinosaurs? Witton thinks not- he points out that film-makers still haven’t wised up to the fact that many dinosaurs had feathers, so portraying them as gummy lippy creatures is probably decades away.Until then, whenever a re-run of Jurassic Park comes on, we can all be cleverclogs and tell everybody that the T.Rex didn’t look like that, and in fact had the steely close-mouthed grin of the worst boss you ever had delivering a written warning.

Wrong, wrong, wrong! What was Steven Spielberg thinking of?

Now normally I would of course link to New Scientist so that you could read the whole thing for yourself, but for some reason this article only seems to appear in the print edition (at the moment). However, there is this article in The Guardian which covers the same ground. Enjoy!