SKIRMISHER

This would really hurt the street cred of this monstah, ending its movie career.

“It’s a distinct possibility that Sue died of starvation by a substantial infection in the back of the throat” brought on by a tiny parasite, said Ewan Wolff, a paleontologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and lead author of a paper describing the team’s findings published Tuesday in the online science journal PloS One.

In the past, Wolff said, many paleontologists have speculated that the holes in Sue’s jaw were caused by bite marks that were a product of Sue’s rampaging lifestyle. T. rexes were among the largest meat-eaters on Earth during their reign in the Cretaceous period 144 million years ago. They had to eat a lot, and often, to support their enormous bodies.

But Wolff and his team propose a much more prosaic cause for Sue’s decline: a disease called trichomonosis that infects modern birds of prey. Birds, which are thought to be direct descendants of dinosaurs, pick up the bug by feeding on other animals infected with the disease, Wolff said.

Wolff thinks the parasite, a protozoan named Trichomonas gallinae, settled in the back of Sue’s throat, and in nine other Tyrannosaurs he studied with similar holes. The parasite caused inflammation that eventually damaged the jawbone, he theorized. As the infection worsened, the throat swelled to a point that “the esophagus gets narrower and narrower,” Wolff said. “Death is by starvation.”

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