Hunger rules the day. And the night. And the afternoons. The eager grunting from the trio of baby Tyrannosaurus can sometimes seem ceaseless, the only quiet coming from the fleeting moments when they have their sharp little jaws clamped around tatters of meat dropped into their increasingly smelly nest, or when they are too tired from begging and sleep. Anytime the three are awake and don’t have something to stuff their mouths, they cry.
The babies are still so small that mother T. rex could drag an entire bloated Torosaurus carcass over to them and they could peck at the ragged edges of flesh for days and days. The infants would be able to feed to their stomachs’ content on the increasingly ripe meat without getting close to finishing the entire spread laid before them. But such a simple route to full bellies would not do much to help this busy, fluffy family. Mother T. rex has a far greater appetite than even the bottomless pit that is Snaggletooth, and hunting for one is challenging enough—much less bringing home fleshy, fatty takeout. At this time, at least, she must survive if her babies are to have a hope of carving out their own place in this humid Cretaceous landscape. She can sometimes bring back a haunch or shattered ribs held together by thin strips of muscle and membrane, but not every meal is lavish.
Protein-rich milk would make things a little easier and require fewer blood-spattered errand runs, but mother T. rex has no milk to give.
Whatever food the little ones consume, it must be supplied by some other creature. The dinosaurs’ digestive systems are incapable of breaking down vegetable matter into anything other than a painfully gassy bloat. The babies need fat and protein, blood and guts. The raw stuff that has allowed carnivorous dinosaurs to spread across the planet over the past 165 million years. Protein-rich milk would make things a little easier and require fewer blood-spattered errand runs, but mother T. rex has no milk to give.
Many different organisms give milk. The chattering and barking mammals that scamper through these woodlands rely on the pale fluid to grow fast, providing mammal pups with the raw materials to start turning the soft cartilage of their skeletons to more resilient bone. Some insects, too, make their own form of milk—protein-laden fluids that drip from tiny spigots on their bodies, providing their wriggling babies with a head start. Even some birds have managed the trick, disgorging a viscous fluid from their throats to offer their chicks as the hungry little chirpers demand ever more meals in the nest. Non-avian dinosaurs, however, never evolved the ability.
Suckling is an impossibility for T. rex, anyway. Through their ancestry, Snaggletooth and her siblings have inherited skulls that will shift and become reinforced to deliver bone-shattering bites. The dinosaurs have not evolved the combination of bones and muscles that would allow them to purse their mouths and draw milk from their mother or otherwise lap it up. Biting and breaking will be far more important to Snaggletooth and her siblings. The pressure to become a skilled predator has pushed T. rex to develop a precocial youth, as well. The sooner the hatchlings learn how to stalk, ambush, and kill prey, the better they’ll be able to carve out a living among these forests and swamps. The nest is warm, comfortable, and protected by mother for now, but every second that passes moves Snaggletooth closer to the day she will have to leave her mother’s company and fend for herself in a world full of much bigger animals—including other T. rex—that could easily injure or kill her. Every bit of practice matters while in the shelter of the nest.
Sanguine supplements brought home by mom certainly help. But tyrannosaurs have not thrived among these wet woodlands of prehistoric Utah just by bringing each other gifts. Snaggletooth and her siblings will have to find prey, kill it, devour it, and make the most of any juicy, rotten bonuses they find scattered around the landscape. Every opportunity to pounce on each other, snap after gnats, and pull shreds of meat from bones is important. The small reptiles have no way of knowing it, but they are training for what they will be doing for the rest of their lives. T. rex is in a constant audition for survival, and in this moment the little ones have to avoid becoming prey while learning how to hunt for themselves.
Fortunately for Snaggletooth, the nest is a mess. The trampled sticks and conifer needles making up the cozy depression in the soil have soaked up goop from their discarded eggshells, waste excreted by the hatchlings, blood and body fluids from meaty meals mother has regurgitated for the little ones, and other pungent compounds that are constantly being produced by living things. The nest is redolent of carnivore, a mix of their own potent musk and the stink of blood and decay. No wonder there are almost always flies buzzing around the depression, not to mention crunchy beetles and spiders that come to hunt the other invertebrates.
T. rex is in a constant audition for survival, and in this moment the little ones have to avoid becoming prey while learning how to hunt for themselves.
A pudgy fly shining in metallic blue is the latest snack to catch Snag’s attention. Her ears are attuned to lower frequencies, such as her mother’s calls, so she can’t hear the persistent buzzing as the fly darts around the nest, slapping its disk-shaped mouth to scraps of meat and urea-soaked patches of nest litter each time it lands among the trampled debris, but the swaying and weaving of the insect have pulled the fluffy little tyrannosaur’s gaze. Every time the twitchy little bug stops for a moment, Snaggletooth focuses to prepare a pounce, only to be thwarted as the fatty snack buzzes to another spot in the nest. The insect is inadvertently taunting her. She must catch it.
Spreading her clawed toes against the floor of the nest, Snaggletooth crouches and pounces at the fly. The moment her shape moves, the insect takes off, weaving a frantic path through the air. Evading predators is a little easier when you’re so much smaller and faster than they are. Snaggletooth snaps at the air with her little jaws, closing nowhere near the fly’s path as it seems to disappear. Other potential meals shuffle and careen across the nest, but Snaggletooth still peers with her forward-facing eyes for the one she has chosen to devour. She notices that the fly has gone back to the same patch of offal.
Snaggletooth watches, tilting her head slightly but keeping her body still. Tensed. Her jaws are tightly shut, in anticipation, ready to be thrown open at any second. She just has to pick the right moment. The attack is not so much a matter of precision as enclosing an area—hopefully a space that the fly is within when her jaws slap shut. It’s practice for what she will someday use to surprise juvenile hadrosaurs and snap up hatchling Torosaurus, the methods of an ambush predator. She’ll fail more times than she’ll succeed. All the more reason to practice, to learn patterns of movement, when a meal might be vulnerable, and how to prepare herself for that first, all-important bite.
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From Tyrant Lizard Queen: The Love, Life, and Terror of Earth’s Greatest Carnivore by Riley Black. Copyright © 2026 by Riley Black. Published with the permission of St. Martin’s Press, an imprint of Martin’s Publishing the Group.
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