T-Rex may have been killed off by throat bug
The mighty T-Rex may have been wiped out by a humble throat infection scientists have claimed.
Tests on fossils showed that holes in their jaws - previously thought to be battle scars from fights with other dinos - are actually the result of a lowly parasite that still afflicts modern birds.
It's now believed the bug - trichomonosis - could have even caused the 42-foot-long, 7-ton monsters so much pain that they refused to eat and ended up starving to death.
And there was us thinking T-Rex ended when Marc Bolan died in a car crash.
The boffins from the University of Wisconsin conducted their tests on 'Sue' a mighty Tyrannosaurus rex whose fossilized remains are a star attraction of the Field Museum in Chicago."What drew my attention to trichomonosis as a potential candidate for these mysterious lesions on the jaws of tyrannosaurs is the manifestation of the effects of the disease in [bird] raptors," explains researcher Ewan Wolff.
"When we started looking at trichomonosis in greater depth, there was a story that matched some lines of evidence for transmission of the disease in tyrannosaurs."
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University of Wisconsin
