salyavin, this is definitely one of those situations in which truth is way
cooler than fiction. Thanks for posting. It amazes me how they could figure out
the ages of the 2 critters.
PS Do you really not like any of what alternative medicine has to offer?!
________________________________
From: salyavin808 <fintlewoodle...@mail.com>
To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, July 16, 2013 2:49 AM
Subject: [FairfieldLife] Tyrannosaurus Was Active Predator!
I'm sure you'll all be as relieved to hear this as I was. They are just so much
*cooler* that way......
T rex tooth found embedded in prey, restoring dinosaur's reputation
Tooth lodged in plant-eating dinosaur's spine proves that T rex wasn't just a
scavenger but also hunted live prey
New evidence suggests T rex was capable of bringing down live prey rather than
simply scavenging dinosaur carcasses. Photograph: Corey Ford/Corbis
Threats to the fearsome reputation of Tyrannosaurus rex appeared to have been
seen off on Monday by fresh evidence unearthed in the US.
The dinosaur's feeding habits have long been debated by academics, with some
claiming that T rex was less a ferocious hunter and more a lumbering slowcoach
that scavenged the carcasses of beasts that had died at the claws of others.
The latest evidence comes from palaeontologists who found remnants of a
prehistoric skirmish in a slab of rock at the Hell Creek Formation in South
Dakota. The clash, which occurred around 66m years ago, involved a T rexand a
large, plant-eating hadrosaur, and ended with the tooth of the former lodged
firmly in the spine of the latter.
Scans of the tooth and two surrounding tail vertebrae showed clear signs of
bone healing around the wound, taken as proof that the hadrosaur was alive at
the time of the attack and survived for several months or even years afterwards.
"This is unambiguous evidence that T rex was an active predator," the authors
write in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "Such
evidence is rare in the fossil record for good reason – prey rarely escapes."
Tyrannosaurs shed their teeth frequently as fresh sets came through. In this
case a weaker rear tooth broke free as the T rex, which was not fully-grown,
chomped on the hadrosaur's tail. The hadrosaur is believed to have been an
adult Edmontosaur, which grew to around 10 metres in length.The tooth crown is
embedded between two hadrosaur vertebrae and the bone has healed over.
Photograph: David A Burnham
"We not only have a broken-off tooth embedded in the bone of another animal,
but the bone has healed over the wound, and a nasty wound it was too," said
David Burnham at Palm Beach Museum of Natural History in Florida.
The remains join a large collection of fossils that tell their own partial
stories about the dining habits of T rex. Previous discoveries reveal rake,
puncture and chew marks on bones, while one specimen – an impressive half-metre
of fossilised faeces – contained partly digested dinosaur bones. In all of
these cases, it is hard to differentiate between predation and scavenging.
Palaeontologists expressed mixed reactions to the latest findings. Jack Horner
at the Museum of the Rockies in Montana, who served as technical adviser on the
Jurassic Park movies, said: "This one piece of evidence does seem to suggest
that a tyrannosaur bit a hadrosaur, but certainly doesn't provide any
indication of the sort of carnivore the rex actually was."
In 2011 Horner and his team reported that T rex was probably an opportunistic
carnivore like hyena, which take carrion and occasional live prey. "This paper
certainly offers no evidence to refute that hypothesis," Horner added.
Paul Barrett, a dinosaur researcher at the Natural History Museum in London,
expressed exasperation that the debate was still ongoing. "The whole T
rexscavenger or predator debate is pretty intractable and not particularly
enlightening. Work on living carnivores, like big cats and wolves, clearly show
they use both strategies depending on what's available to them. They'll
generally make do with a meal from either source if it satisfies their dietary
needs. Any other extinct carnivore, including T rex, is likely to have been the
same," he said.
"This paper shows without question that a T rex bit a living hadrosaur, but it
can't show if this was a regular behaviour or not, or even if this was hunting
behaviour rather than some other kind of interaction," he added.
But Sam Turvey, a senior research fellow at the Institute of Zoology in London,
called it "important and convincing" new evidence. "Even though T rex may have
fed on carcasses when the opportunity arose – a behaviour also seen in
modern-day carnivorous large mammals such as lions – the new findings provide
strong evidence that these iconic dinosaurs were fully capable of being active
predators, and help to dismiss the ecologically unrealistic hypothesis that
they were restricted to a scavenging lifestyle," he said.
* Ian Sample, science correspondent
* The Guardian, Monday 15 July 2013 20.00 BST
*
