Is the theory that T-Rex was actually a scavenger still going, or was that shot down?
Why is that?
Top of the head, cows are much larger animals and have much higher calorie requirements per day.
You also need about 16 months to two years to raise a beef cow to slaughter.
Broiler chickens go from egg to slaughter in 6-8 weeks.
Growing up we had around 6-8 sows on our farm. We would sell all the piglets to the commercial farms after they were weaned because the cost per pound to get them up to market weight wasnt viable to a lot of the smaller farms
Not only was that shot down, we have very direct evidence to contradict it. T-Rex teeth have been found broken off in other dinosaurs who managed to survive the attacks long enough to grow back bone mass in the damaged area, encasing the foreign tooth. Additionally, the T-Rex skull was unique among tyrannosaurs, or any other giant carnivores for that matter, strengthened in key ways to allow them to slam their upper jaws down into prey with tremendous force. (Hence the teeth buried in spinal columns!) No other tyrannosaur is known to have biting strength like this, and structural analysis of both near & distant cousins’ skulls indicates they would have fractured their skulls if they tried. Or at least that’s what the current (up to the past decade) understanding seems to be.
I’m assuming that your experience with our dinosaur friends the crocs informs this post. And I can’t find fault.
Aren’t birds basically dinosaurs?
So, question for you as you’re, uh, knee deep in it. Do crocs ever attack their own? Eat others young or their own? Like, is there any bond or pack mentality attributed to a group of crocs beyond they are all hungry?
Because of my own question I looked up the term for a grouping of crocs and it’s a bask. Because of course it is. Homies like to sit and chill until meal time.
As a longtime veteran of the gif war, I feel your pain.
Agreed, but I think the old notion was that T-Rex exclusively scavenged, as though it were too big & slow to catch anything. The other classic myth is that they couldn’t see very well. That one’s probably thanks to Jurassic Park. In reality, the T-Rex eye socket is the largest known, and its skull indicates binocular vision. This was no blind buffoon. It likely had the keenest eyesight of any creature ever to walk the earth.
Pretty fascinating that there is misinformation about crocs considering they still live and have done so for the entire time humans have been in existence. Thanks for the additional descriptions of some of their mentality. I’ll correct my term to, “float,” as well.
I had thought all along that cannibalism of young was very much a thing. What you describe is much more like other natural predators. Even Lions will chase off or even kill the younger males when they take over a pride. But it’s nuanced and it sounds like for crocs, also very much the case.
Not sure why that’s surprising. There’s all sorts of misinformation/misapprehensions about all sorts of animals, and just huge amounts we don’t know about animal behaviour. I mean there’s the whole eels thing, for instance, which we’ve only just worked out. And the spontaneous generation theory only died out a couple hundred years ago.
Very true and an excellent point. It’s just easy to forget how little we know when the study of things like dinosaurs presents so much information that’s been learned over time. That eel article leaves me with a ton of questions. Like, how do the young eels get BACK through that 3000 mile journey? Why is the spawning in that one area only? It’s like a reverse salmon spawning, going to more (assumed) dangerous areas to spawn.
Exactly this. For some reason there are a lot of politics in paleontology, and presumably other sciences, and it got trendy to diminish T-rex and elevate others in a very petulant, non-scientific way. I blame Jack Horner, a clear moron, who made up or stole (warm-blooded dinos) everything is known for - it’s too bad Jurassic Park was influenced by him.
What do you mean? Dinosaurs were not simply cold-blooded, nor warm-blooded. Somewhere in between, close to what birds are. What side did Jack Horner take and how did it make things bad?
You didn’t hear about the Christmas pie incident?
No. Please fill me in!
Little Jack Horner
Sat in the corner,
Eating his Christmas pie;
He put in his thumb,
And pulled out a plum,
And said, “What a good boy am I!”
I love you, man. :)
Hahahahaha!
My understanding is your statement is the subject of debate - i.e. some paleontologists think all dinosaurs were warm-blooded, while others think there may have been a mix. Regardless, essentially nobody now thinks that dinosaurs were all cold-blooded, which was the normal thinking until the 70s or maybe 80s.
Jurassic Park, book and movie, reflected that, and as Jack Horner was an advisor, the “revelation” that dinosaurs were warm-blooded is sometimes inappropriately credited to him because of the movie - that’s all