The bone-shattering bite of a Tyrannosaurus rex could have crushed a car, delivering up to six tons of pressure to its hapless victims. But while multiple lines of evidence support this estimate of the dinosaur’s mighty bite force, debate has swirled about how it got the job done with what seems to be a loosely jointed skull.

The answer is, it didn’t, according to a new model of all the stresses and strains that moved across a T. rex skull as it chomped down. The results, presented this month in the journal The Anatomical Record, show that the skull bones of T. rex must have been held fixed and rigid for the animal to have had such a