In the Cretaceous Period, dinosaurs rarely die of old age. Predators rule. Their killers engineered for one purpose, attack.

Tyrannosaurus Rex was of ten thousand pound, self-propelled, antitank weapon.

Now, sixty five million years later, cutting-edge imaging technology lets us look deep inside their bodies to reveal just how the world’s greatest carnivores really work. Dinosaurs arm themselves with the most advanced weaponry nature has ever unleashed, tools that allow them to survive for over 100 million years.

North America, 115 million years ago, reptilian creatures have evolved into killing machines. Death is everywhere, sweeping down from the air, stalking the forest, and sometimes thundering through the trees in the form of Tyrannosaurus Rex.

T-Rex was the ultimate predator in the history of terrestrial animals.

T-Rex is one of the largest and deadliest animals ever to walk on two legs. For 2 million years, it rules the American West. Powerful and intelligent, this predator is equipped with the tools to bring down massive and well-armed prey.

The head, the skull of T-Rex is awesomely large.

And each tooth is an armor-crushing weapon.

Tyrannosaurus Rex means tyrant lizard king. This alfa predator is 12 meters long, 5.5 meters tall and weighs 6 tons.

The jaws of T-Rex are infamous and lethal, housing sixty teeth with some as long as 30 centimeters. Its skull is constructed of 64 bones designed to be light but strong. It’s 16 times stronger than the jaws of an alligator. The front teeth are dagger-shaped, with serrated edges designed to tear flesh. The larger side teeth are rounded, perfect for crunching bone. Solidly anchored into muscle, they could withstand pressure from any direction.

We have a pretty good idea of how it killed its prey. It seems to have just walked right up to them, taken a bite, and whatever happens happens.

Unlike many dinosaurs, they wouldn’t just take the flesh of the carcass. They basically eat most of the carcass.

T-Rex’s huge legs and pelvis make up half its total body weight. Its tail weighs almost a ton. This is because it has to balance out nearly half a ton of head and jaws. Their head is two thirds muscle, which power jaws capable of enough force to bite through a steel oil drum.

All that muscle delivers a bite strong enough to defeat the toughest prey of the Cretaceous.

T-Rex’s teeth are among the bluntest teeth, bluntest, least sharp of the whole family of Tyrannosaurs. Those teeth are designed to crush, to penetrate thick layers of armor, and muscle, in a crushing, massive hemorrhaging blow.

The muscles in T-Rex’s neck are nearly as powerful as the muscles of its legs. At half a meter thick, they’re strong enough to lift a hippo or bring down the most well-armed, best-defended herbivore nature has ever produced, Triceratops.

The best way to attack Triceratops is with a long-barreled, 75 millimeter antitank gun.

Triceratops protects itself with a bony shield called a frill. They can fend off an attacker with a pair of one-meter-long swords.

You’ve got to crush it. The only way to deal with this huge, curved, cantilevered, composite armor is a crushing blow with multiple teeth.

But defeating a Triceratops takes more than just teeth. It also requires power. Triceratops’ most dangerous weapons are mounted on a skull that can swivel 360 degrees.

Triceratops would want to keep that horns and the frill pointed right at T-Rex.

For a T-Rex, the key to defeating a Triceratops is his huge jaws, driven by two sets of powerful muscles. The first runs from the top of the skull down to the bottom of the jaw. These muscles give this carnivore’s bite its spear. The second set are muscles which make up almost 50% of the muscles in the head, and wrap around the lower jaw, tying it to the roof of the mouth. They give T-Rex’s bite its 3 tons of force, twice the biting power of a great white shark. And not only that. Just like a python, T-Rex can dislocate its jaw.

Cranial kinesis is basically the ability to swallow things larger than your own head. That’s because the skull expands as it opens up—snakes swallowing whole chicken eggs. A snake head that’s, you know, much smaller than the egg, and it will swallow that whole egg. There’s not a lawyer in this world that’s too fat that this T-Rex couldn’t swallow him whole.

Tyrannosaurus Rex is a carnivorous monster that uses sheer force to overpower well-defended prey.