The tyrannosaurus rex couldn't stick out its tongue, according to new research from The University of Texas at Austin and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The researchers compared the hyoid bones - which support and ground the tongue - of modern birds and crocodiles to those of dinosaurs.
"In most extinct dinosaurs their tongue bones are very short. And in crocodilians with similarly short hyoid bones, the tongue is totally fixed to the floor of the mouth," co-author and Jackson School Professor Julia Clarke said in a statement.
This was not the only finding from the researchers' work - they found that pterosaurs birdlike dinosaurs were more like modern birds and had a variety of hyoid bones, hinting at the idea that the evolution of flight and the tongue are linked.
"If you can't use a hand to manipulate prey, the tongue may become much more important to manipulate food," lead author Zhiheng Li, an associate professor at the Key Laboratory of Vertebrate Evolution and Human Origins of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said in a statement.
There was however, one exception to linking tongue diversity to flight.
Ornithischian, which include triceratops, ankylosaurs and other plant-eating dinosaurs that chewed their food also had complex and mobile hyoid bones, however these were different to those of flying dinosaurs and pterosaurs.
You can read the full study at PlosOne.
