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Re: How Did Hadrosaurs Survive?




From: Bill Hunt <bill@huntstudios.com>
Reply-To: bill@huntstudios.com
To: <rob@dinodomain.com>
CC: <dinosaur@usc.edu>
Subject: Re: How Did Hadrosaurs Survive? Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2002 14:50:09 -0700


> From: "Rob Gay" <rob@dinodomain.com>
> Reply-To: rob@dinodomain.com
> Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2002 10:29:09 -0700
> To: "Dinosaur Mailing List" <dinosaur@usc.edu>
> Subject: Re: How Did Hadrosaurs Survive?
>
> And the great amount of food provided by one hadrosaur kill. Modern
> predators don't hunt all the time, it is unlikely that dinosaurs did either.


    Lions spend 90% of their time sleeping and lazing around.  One
wildebeast will keep the pride fat and happy for about 3 days, depending on
the size of the wildebeast and the size of the pride.


> Zebra don't have weapons, and still manage to not get hunted to extinction
> by lions, leopards, and cheetahs.


    Ever been kicked in the head by a Zebra?

> Yet the healed bite wound is on the tail...
    Hit & miss just like modern predetors.  The whole notion here that a
predator species could by itself, catch, kill and eat ALL of it's prey
species, thereby driving both to extinction is rediculous.  I can think of
no contemporary examples of this.

Newly introducd predators have devastated some ecosystems. The brown tree snake wiped out nearly all of the native birds on Guam. New species, including predators, are said to evolve in isolation, then spread. Essentially there may be little difference between the effects of a newly evolved predator and a newly introduced one. The advent of Tyrannosaurus apparently resulted in the extinction of various Edmontonian taxa least able to fight it or evade it e.g. Euoplocephalus, which was replaced by a larger Lancian defender.




Could all the roqurals in the oceans eat
all the krill? Could all the barn owls in the barn eat all the mice in the
barn? Not likely. The krill and the mice can reproduce at a much faster
rate than whales and owls. The biomass of the prey population usually
exceeds the biomass of the predator population by orders of magnitude. In
fact predators, by weeding out the sick, the weak, the old, the stupid, the
inattentative and inept, serve to strengthen the gene pool of said prey
species. Weren't Hadrosaurs and Ceratopsains the most abundant herbivores
of the late Cretaceous, and T-rex relatively rare?

I don't know if we can be certain of this. Recent work in the Hell Creek suggests T. rex was pretty abundant. Fewer Edmontosaurus specimens were found.



Just like modern
predator/prey ratios?  The dinosaurs may be gone but the fundamental
principles of ecology still apply  -  Bill

Bill & Rebecca Hunt
Hunt Wildlife Studios
119 Bierstadt Ct
Livermore,  CO  80536
970-484-0894
e-mail;  bill@huntstudios.com
Web;  http://www.huntstudios.com


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