The Touching Story of a Dinosaur Face

A reconstruction of the face of Daspletosaurus horneri, based on bone textures, reveals a host of details. (Illustration courtesy of Dino Pulerà) The eyes may be the window to the soul, but for paleontologists, reconstructing a dinosaur face opens doors into how it may have perceived and interacted with its environment — as well as some features it shared with distant evolutionary kin. Researchers report being able to put a face to the name of 75-million-year-old Daspletosaurus horneri, a newly described member of one of Dinosauria's most famous lineages, and discover the animal was the touchy-feely sort. Bones preserve a lot more than just the internal scaffolding of an animal. Certain textures, from tiny holes to striations to knobby bits can be clues to how and where muscles attached (and what size the muscles were), whether an animal had ornamentation and even the texture of its skin. Case in point: D. horneri, a tyrannosaurid from the Late Cretaceous of Montana, described for the first time today in Scientific Reports. And yes, fellow dino-geeks, the species name is a nod to the mighty Jack Horner, one of the world's most influential paleontologists and no stranger to Montana digs. D. horneri, known from the complete skull and bits of a front and hind limb of one adult plus fragments of at least two other individuals, was about 30 feet long and more than 7 feet tall. Like its distant cousin T. rex, D. horneri was a bipedal carnivore with front limbs really only useful for playing the ukelele.