Grad student bitten by T. rex research

An opportunity to participate in fascinating research as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh helped lead graduate student Shannon Brink to pursue a master’s degree at East Carolina University.

Brink was in a paleontology class with UW Oshkosh’s Dr. Joseph Peterson when he asked the class if anyone was interested in participating in research.

Researchers recreated the bite of a juvenile T. rex using an electromechanical testing frame and a tooth modeled of cobalt alloy. (Drawing by Brian Engh)

“As class went on I definitely became interested in working with him, so I went to his office hours … and he gave me a couple of different options, one of which was to determine the bite force of juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex, which excited me — as it would anybody,” Brink said.

After Brink had a chance to get up to speed by reviewing literature on the topic, she traveled to the University of Buffalo, where she worked with Dr. Jack Tseng on a project funded by the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh Office of Student Research and Creativity.

“There are not a lot of young T. rex bite marks that have been identified and published upon,” Brink said. “There are a bunch on adult T. rex because we have bite marks all over the place.”

Tseng, Peterson and Brink’s project was unique in that it wasn’t a theoretical calculation of bite force; they set out to physically test the force required to create puncture marks similar to those found on fossilized dinosaur bones and attributed to a juvenile T. rex.

Using leg bones from a cow, a juvenile T. rex tooth modeled out of dental grade cobalt alloy, and an electromechanical testing frame, they indented the tooth into the bone over and over.

“We were able to create this relationship between bite force and cortical bone thickness, and we used that relationship to estimate the bite required to recreate the sets of fossilized bite marks that we had … in the lab,” Brink said.

They determined that the juvenile T. rex could have exerted up to 5,641 newtons of force, far less than the 35,000 newtons generated by an adult T. rex but significantly greater than previous estimates of about 4,000 newtons. For comparison, a human’s bite force is in the 300 newton range.

The study, which bears Brink’s name alongside Tseng’s and Peterson’s, was recently published in the PeerJ journal.

“It’s very exciting,” Brink said. “It’s a little bit surreal, (because) I never saw myself … publishing academic literature.”

Shannon Brink’s undergraduate research on the bite force of juvenile Tyrannosaurus rexes helped lead her to pursue a master’s degree at ECU. (Photo by Rhett Butler)

Brink said she was in field camp — a six-week capstone course to complete her bachelor’s degree in geology at UW Oshkosh — when she got another push from a professor to apply to graduate schools. Put in the applications and at least give yourself the chance, he told her.

“And then I met my advisor, Dr. (Natasha) Bell, who I’m working with now, and she’s in the environmental engineering department,” Brink said. “She has gotten me interested in water quality and really nurtured that curiosity.”

At ECU, Brink is working on a master’s thesis centered on water quality — comparing different substrates for their de-nitrifying capabilities and investigating whether the presence of E. coli affects those capabilities.

“Doing research in undergrad got me excited to do research in grad school, and it really kind of helped to propel me here because if I didn’t have that experience, if I didn’t know what it was like to take ownership of a project like that, then I don’t think I would have had the confidence or the will, really, to go through with getting my graduate degree,” Brink said.

ECU works to inspire its own undergraduates through its Office of Undergraduate Research, which offers a variety of programs and grants that support mentor-led undergraduate research, giving students a way to investigate possible career paths and learn new techniques that aren’t found in a traditional classroom setting.

To read more about the power of T. rex’s chompers, visit sciencedaily.com.