The T-Rex skull was massively overbuilt with fused nasals and a bone structure designed to resist the forces of its extraordinarily powerful bite, far exceeding other similarly sized carnivores.

Hone compares the T-Rex skull to Giganotosaurus, showing T-Rex has far more bone mass, fused nasals, and a jaw built to withstand the stresses of its crushingly powerful bite. ✦ AI generated

Dave Hone · Lex Fridman · 2025-09-04 · original ↗

If you put Giganotosaurus T-Rex in... just look at the robusticity. Like the front of the snout of T-Rex is all bone. And yet the major openings is a thing called the Antorbital Fenestra, the opening in front of the orbit. It's absolutely massive in Giganotosaurus. It's like half the skull. The opening at the back of the skull is much bigger. The opening in the lower jaw is much bigger. And actually the jaw, what you can't see side to side is much thinner. So the heads are the same size. And as animals, they are about the same linear dimensions. But you can just see there's just way more bone in the T-Rex. ... So you need this kind of structure for the power that Crush has. So one of the big things tyrannosaurs have, and this goes all the way down to the earliest tyrannosaurs were like our size, like little ditty things like 2, 3 meters long, be a meter and a half tall. But they have fused nasals. So the pair of bones that in us, there's not a lot there, but obviously in something like a dog or something like a baboon with a long nose, it's like the whole top of the snout. And there's two, one each side. In tyrannosaurs, they fuse together. So they form a solid bit of bone. So the whole top of the nose is solid. And then that makes it very strong. And with that giant head, with all that extra bone and then all the extra musculature attached to that giant head, they've got this uber powerful bite and the ability to just chomp through basically the thing it wants to.

verbatim transcript · starts at 17:57