Re: New Tyrannosaurus Study

[David Krentz <ddkrentz@charter.net>]

  According to this, T.rex could just roll the percentile dice ( or 20 sided, 
if you are into that kind of thing) to see who he encountered next.  He may 
have always lost initiative due to his size though.  

D
On Jan 26, 2011, at 10:40 AM, Tor Bertin wrote:

> I'm extremely skeptical of attempts to create "expected encounter rates" 
> through the fossil record. That kind of community-level resolution is all but 
> impossible.
> 
>> Abstract: Identifying tradeoffs between hunting and
>> scavenging in an
>> ecological context is important for understanding predatory
>> guilds. In the
>> past century, the feeding strategy of one of the largest
>> 
>> terrestrial carnivores, Tyrannosaurus rex, has been the
>> subject of much
>> debate: was it an active predator or an obligate scavenger?
>> Here we look at
>> the feasibility of an adult T. rex being an obligate
>> scavenger in the
>> environmental conditions of Late Cretaceous North America,
>> given the size
>> distributions of sympatric herbivorous dinosaurs and likely
>> competition with
>> more abundant small-bodied theropods. We predict that
>> nearly 50 per cent of
>> herbivores would have been within a 55-85 kg range, and
>> calculate based on
>> expected encounter rates that carcasses from these
>> individuals would have
>> been quickly consumed by smaller theropods. Larger
>> carcasses would have been
>> very rare and heavily competed for, making them an
>> unreliable food source.
>> The potential carcass search rates of smaller theropods are
>> predicted to be
>> 14-60 times that of an adult T. rex. Our results suggest
>> that T. rex and
>> other extremely large carnivorous dinosaurs would have been
>> unable to
>> compete as obligate scavengers and would have primarily
>> hunted large
>> vertebrate prey, similar to many large mammalian carnivores
>> in modern-day
>> ecosystems.
> 
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