A Tyrannosaur stalking an edmontosaurus
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"The Bite"
Paleoartist Jenn Hall.
A paper published on 17 February 2026 in PeerJ by Taia C.A. Wyenberg-Henzler of la of Montana State University, USA, reports on a remarkable fossil from the Hell Creek Formation of eastern Montana: a nearly complete, articulated skull of an adult Edmontosaurus annectens with the broken tip of a tyrannosaur tooth still embedded in its left nasal bone.
The fossil dates from the closing stages of the Late Cretaceous, roughly 66 million years ago, shortly before Edmontosaurus, Tyrannosaurus and all other non-avian dinosaurs disappeared during the Cretaceous–Palaeogene mass extinction. The bone surrounding the embedded tooth shows no evidence of healing or remodelling, indicating that the bite occurred at, very near or shortly after the death of the Edmontosaurus.
In other words, this is physical evidence of a violent interaction between predator and prey tens of millions of years before humans existed—precisely the sort of evidence that creationists are conditioned to reject because it cannot be accommodated within their mythology. According to young-Earth creationism, there was supposedly no death, predation or suffering before human ‘sin’ allowed evil to enter the world and ruin their omnipotent creator’s previously perfect creation—apparently without that omnipotent creator either foreseeing or preventing it. And all this supposedly happened only 6,000–10,000 years ago, shortly after ‘Creation Week’.
The doctrine that no animal died before ‘the Fall’ is not stated explicitly anywhere in the Bible. It is a theological inference imposed upon the text because young-Earth creationism requires it. It belongs to the category of reasoning that says: ‘This must be true for the rest of my beliefs to be true; my beliefs cannot be wrong; therefore, this must also be true.’
Having granted themselves this assumption of infallibility, creationists must then protect it from every fact that contradicts it. The belief cannot be mistaken, so the evidence must somehow be misunderstood, fraudulent, planted by Satan, created with the appearance of age or otherwise unworthy of consideration. Anything, in fact, is preferable to the intellectually honest admission that the belief itself has been falsified.
In almost every other field of human endeavour, such a supremely arrogant claim to personal infallibility would be laughed at and its proponent told to grow up. Yet, when packaged as religious faith, it is not merely tolerated but frequently treated with respect. Its advocates demand—and often receive—special privileges and social status: ‘You must listen to me, allow me to make laws governing your life and let me shape society according to my beliefs because I have an invisible friend and wear special robes.’
And so creationism staggers on, obliged to deny a veritable deluge of scientific evidence rather than concede that its mythology bears no resemblance to the history of life on Earth.
Wyenberg-Henzler and Scannella identified the embedded tooth by using computed tomography to reveal its full size, shape and orientation within the skull. They then compared its dimensions, curvature, cross-sectional shape and serrations with the teeth of the various carnivorous dinosaurs known from the Hell Creek Formation. Their analysis indicates that it was most probably a middle or rear upper-jaw tooth from an adult Tyrannosaurus.
Scientifically, the particularly interesting feature is what the fossil reveals about the encounter itself. The orientation of the tooth indicates that the Tyrannosaurus bit the Edmontosaurus from the front, while several associated tooth marks show that more than one tooth struck the snout. The force was sufficient to drive one tooth through the nasal bone and break off its tip.
The absence of healing means that it is impossible to prove conclusively whether the Edmontosaurus was alive at the instant of the bite, so scavenging or the manipulation of a fresh carcass cannot be excluded entirely. Nevertheless, the direction of the attack, the enormous force involved and the otherwise articulated condition of the skull led the authors to conclude that predation is the more likely explanation. The Tyrannosaurus may have seized the snout to control a struggling animal or delivered a crushing killing bite that obstructed its airway. Other marks on the skull suggest that feeding continued after death and that most—but not all—of the carcass was eventually consumed before the remains were abandoned.
The Hell Creek Formation. The Hell Creek Formation is a fossil-rich sequence of sedimentary rocks deposited during the final part of the Late Cretaceous Period, approximately 68–66 million years ago. It preserves the last one or two million years of the age of the non-avian dinosaurs, immediately before the Cretaceous–Palaeogene, or K–Pg, mass extinction.The paper in PeerJ was accompanied by a news release from Montana State University:
The formation is named after Hell Creek in Garfield County, Montana, where its rocks were studied during fossil-hunting expeditions led by the American palaeontologist Barnum Brown in the early twentieth century. It is exposed extensively across eastern Montana and parts of North Dakota and South Dakota, with broadly equivalent rocks known as the Lance Formation in Wyoming and the Frenchman and Scollard formations in Canada.
What was the environment like?
The landscape bore little resemblance to the dry badlands seen there today. Hell Creek was then a broad, low-lying coastal plain between the rising Rocky Mountains to the west and the retreating Western Interior Seaway to the east.
Meandering rivers crossed a landscape containing floodplains, forests, ponds, lakes, swamps, estuaries and abandoned river channels. Sand, silt, mud and plant material deposited in these environments eventually became the sandstones, mudstones, claystones and thin coal seams that make up the formation.
The climate was warm and humid, although probably seasonal, supporting forests and wetlands containing flowering plants, conifers, ferns, horsetails, cycads and ginkgo-like trees. Crocodilians, turtles and other warmth-dependent animals indicate that winters were much milder than those experienced in Montana today.
Animals of Hell Creek
The formation is famous for some of the last non-avian dinosaurs to live before the K–Pg extinction, including:
- Tyrannosaurus rex — the ecosystem’s largest known terrestrial predator;
- Triceratops — one of the most abundant large herbivores;
- Edmontosaurus annectens — a large, primarily quadrupedal hadrosaur;
- Ankylosaurus — a heavily armoured herbivore with a massive tail club;
- Pachycephalosaurus — distinguished by its thick, domed skull;
- Thescelosaurus — a comparatively small, lightly built herbivore.
Hell Creek was not simply a landscape of giant dinosaurs. Its rocks also preserve the remains of birds, pterosaurs, small mammals, crocodilians, turtles, snakes, lizards, frogs, salamanders and numerous freshwater fish. Fossilised leaves, wood, seeds, pollen, molluscs and insects help palaeontologists to reconstruct the wider ecosystem in which these animals lived.
Why is Hell Creek scientifically important?
The Hell Creek Formation provides one of the world’s most detailed terrestrial records of the closing stages of the Cretaceous. Its uppermost rocks approach the K–Pg boundary, above which non-avian dinosaur fossils disappear. The overlying early Palaeocene rocks record the recovery of plants, mammals and other surviving groups after the Chicxulub asteroid impact and the resulting mass extinction.
Hell Creek is therefore not a single fossil deposit or a jumble of animals killed simultaneously. It is a thick succession of river, floodplain and wetland sediments accumulated over an immense span of time. Different layers preserve different communities, environmental changes and individual events—including predation, scavenging, flooding, decomposition and burial.
The Edmontosaurus skull containing an embedded Tyrannosaurus tooth is one such moment: a brief but violent interaction preserved within a geological record extending across nearly two million years.
Rare fossil at Montana State’s Museum of the Rockies records Tyrannosaurus attack
A fossil on display at Montana State University’s Museum of the Rockies reveals how dinosaurs in the Tyrannosaurus genus may have subdued prey, and the specimen is the focus of a new collaborative research publication between scientists at MSU and the University of Alberta in Canada.
The giant carnivorous dinosaur Tyrannosaurus roamed the region that is now Montana at the end of the Age of Dinosaurs, about 66 million years ago. It lived alongside other large dinosaurs, including plant-eaters like Triceratops and the duck-billed Edmontosaurus.
In 2005, a nearly complete Edmontosaurus skull was found in the Hell Creek Formation of eastern Montana on lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management. The skull is now housed in the paleontology collection at Museum of the Rockies, and it contains a telling detail: lodged inside its face is the tooth of a tyrannosaur.
Now on display in the museum’s Hall of Horns and Teeth, the skull became the focus of a collaboration between University of Alberta doctoral student Taia Wyenberg-Henzler and Museum of the Rockies’ Curator of Paleontology John Scannella. The results of their research were published today in the Scientific Journal PeerJ.
Although bite marks on bones are relatively common, finding an embedded tooth is extremely rare. The great thing about an embedded tooth, particularly in a skull, is it gives you the identity of not only who was bitten but also who did the biting. This allowed us to paint a picture of what happened to this Edmontosaurus, kind of like Cretaceous crime scene investigators.
Taia C.A. Wyenberg-Henzler, lead author
Department of Biological Sciences
University of Alberta
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
Comparing the embedded tooth to all the carnivorous inhabitants in the Hell Creek Formation revealed that it most closely matched with the teeth of Tyrannosaurus. CT scans of the skull, performed at Advanced Medical Imaging at Bozeman Health Deaconess Hospital, helped provide greater detail.
A fossil like this is extra exciting because it captures a behavior: a tyrannosaur biting into this duckbill’s face. The skull shows no signs of healing around the tyrannosaur tooth, so it may have already been dead when it was bitten, or it may be dead because it was bitten.
John B. Scannella, co-author.
Museum of the Rockies and Department of Earth Sciences
Montana State University
Bozeman, MT, USA.Looking at the way the tooth is embedded in the nose of the Edmontosaurus suggests that it met its attacker face-to-face, something that usually happens to an animal that was killed by a predator. The amount of force necessary for a tooth to have become broken off in bone also points to the use of deadly force. For me, this paints a terrifying picture of the last moments of this Edmontosaurus.
Taia C.A. Wyenberg-Henzler.
The feeding habits of Tyrannosaurus, one of the largest meat-eating animals to ever walk the Earth, have been the subject of study and debate for decades. The tooth inside this Edmontosaurus skull provides a further glimpse into Tyrannosaurus behavior, Scannella said.
Publication:
What this fossil preserves, then, is not merely an isolated tooth or an injured skull, but a brief episode in the ecology of the latest Cretaceous: a powerful predator closing on a large herbivore, biting with sufficient force to drive a tooth into bone and leave part of it embedded there. Whether the bite itself killed the Edmontosaurus or was delivered moments after death, it records an ordinary biological reality — animals were hunting, killing, scavenging and being eaten tens of millions of years before humans existed.
There is nothing mysterious about that conclusion. The tooth, the damaged bone, the absence of healing, the geological context and the associated feeding marks all fit together within a coherent account of predation, death, burial and fossilisation. Each part of the evidence supports the others, and none requires mythology, magic or theological special pleading.
For creationism, however, the fossil is another inconvenient object that should not exist. It belongs to a world of deep time, ancient ecosystems and natural death long before any supposed human ‘Fall’. To preserve the dogma, creationists must deny the age of the rocks, misrepresent the fossil record or invent excuses for why their creator produced a world containing such persuasive evidence against their beliefs.
Science does not need to force this skull into a predetermined story. It allows the evidence to tell its own story — one of a living world shaped by predation, extinction and change over immense spans of time. Creationism, by contrast, begins with the answer and then demands that reality be altered to fit it. The broken tyrannosaur tooth remains embedded in the skull, but it is creationism’s credibility that is really stuck beyond recovery.
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