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Allosaurus could open its jaw super-wide, like a snake.

A flexible "trap-mouth" let it bite chunks out of much bigger dinosaurs.

2 min read
Allosaurus could open its jaw super-wide, like a snake.
THE FULL STORY

Allosaurus was the top predator of the Late Jurassic about 150 million years ago - about 50 million years before T. rex showed up. Around 28 feet long, fast, and fierce, it ruled what’s now western North America.

The strangest feature was its mouth. Allosaurus could open its jaws to about 90 degrees - wider than most predators today. Its skull was almost like a hatchet: it would swing its head down hard, using the upper jaw like an axe to bite chunks of flesh out of much bigger prey. Then it could back away and let the wounded prey weaken.

That hatchet-bite let Allosaurus tackle prey it could never bring down in a head-on fight - including young sauropods many times its size, and the spiky Stegosaurus (which sometimes won).

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