Anyone who has ever wrestled with a lobster or a particularly stubborn crab leg in a seafood restaurant could perhaps sympathize with poor Tyrannosaurus Rex, trying to chow down on a Triceratops. In particular, how the heck do you eat one of those things, what with the big bony shield and the large pointy bits? Via Nature News, with illustrations that do kind of resemble those “How to Eat a Lobster” placemats you occasionally find in restaurants, new research from Denver Fowler at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana, examined T. Rex bite marks on Triceratops bones and concluded that the best way to nosh on such a heavily armed and be-horned beast was to tear the head off, rather like when you get one of those fully intact shrimp. Also:

It also shows that Tyrannosaurus also had a daintier side. Fowler and his team found precise, even delicate, bites along the front of several Triceratops skulls, and suggest that these are nibbles on the tender meat found on the face.

OK, let’s pause and reflect on the meaning of the term “dainty,” not usually used in conjunction with face-eating. But with dinosaurs, perhaps it’s all relative. Furthermore:

The discoveries led Fowler and his colleagues to question whether the feeding behaviour of Tyrannosaurus changed substantially as the animals grew. The team proposes that, with their particularly thick teeth, adult tyrannosaurids would have been well-suited to tearing apart something as tough as a Triceratops, whereas younger individuals may have had to rely on different feeding strategies to prevent them from damaging their teeth.

I’d recommend the Triceratops bisque.