Good news for fans of Tyrannosaurus rex (and I suspect that all living humans are fans)—the lizard king can keep its tyrant crown. Classic T. rex enthusiasts have had some rough times lately, with some researchers suggesting that the iconic carnivore may need to be redrawn in fluffier, feathery garb, and others proposing that T. rex wasn’t a hunter at all.

Proponents of this latter view (including the well-known paleontologist Jack Horner) thought that tyrannosaurs were ill-suited to hunting and likely scavenged for carrion instead, partly because of the species' bulky size. The image of T. rex skulking around to sneak bites of carcasses didn’t sit well with some.

There has been considerable debate among paleontologists about this point, which isn’t easy to settle. While fossil finds commonly shed light on what various dinosaurs ate, understanding how they got their claws on those meals is a much tougher puzzle. Tooth marks in bones can sometimes be matched to a carnivore, but they leave an open question: did that gnawing take place at the end of a successful hunt (from the hunter’s point of view), or was the gnawing recipient already dead?

The clearest way for a fossil to show evidence of a predatory altercation is for the prey animal to survive it. Healed wounds look different from fatal ones. But even if you find such scars, you still need to be able to positively identify the perpetrator.

You can imagine the excitement, then, when a group of paleontologists uncovered a find that does just that. Working in rocks of the Late Cretaceous Hell Creek Formation in South Dakota, they found a funky-looking pair of vertebrae that were fused together by bone. Barely sticking out of the growth between the vertebrae was a tooth, sealed in place.

The vertebrae came from the tail of a hadrosaur (also known as a duck-billed dinosaur). The tooth belonged to a well-known tyrannosaur. By looking closely at the bone, it became clear that the T. rex had lost one of the teeth it sunk into the unlucky hadrosaur’s tail, which then became infected before slowly healing over due to bone growth. Based on how long this would take in modern animals and what we know about dinosaur physiology, the healing would have required several months to years, meaning that the hadrosaur lived at least that long after its near death encounter with T. rex.

This is T. rex, the hunter, caught as much in the act as you can get millions of years later, making it unlikely that the species was solely a scavenger. (Most modern predators will also happily eat a carcass given the chance.) What’s more, this could also tell us something about how T. rex hunted. The researchers point out that one tactic for big predators trying to take down prey is to go after the hind legs, preventing the hapless creature’s escape. At least in this instance, the T. rex may have given chase before grabbing the hadrosaur by the rear rather than going for the back of the neck or the throat, for example.

The researchers also note that the Late Cretaceous food web makes a little more sense with T. rex as a predator rather than a scavenger, given their abundance and large size. It would have taken a lot of animals dropping dead to feed that many hungry tyrannosaurs.

This find provides pretty solid evidence of T. rex’s status as a mighty hunter. It might still be the case that we’ll need to get used to thinking of them with feathers (or bristles) of some sort. The King wears what the King wears.

PNAS, 2013. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1216534110 (About DOIs).