Battat stego / road kill / veggisaurus bites

[Mike Bonham <bonham@jade.ab.ca>]

Tom Holtz <tholtz@geochange.er.usgs.gov> responded to a message
from dwn194@soton.ac.uk (DARREN NAISH):

> >2) The new [Battat Toys/Boston Museum] model
> >lacks a throat sac covered in ossicles, a feature almost
> >definitely
> >proved to exist since the discovery of the last S. (a stenops I think)
> >somewhere
> >in the Rocky Mountain area.
> 
> Actually, the original road kill specimen, long on display at the
> Smithsonian, had proved those long ago.  The new road kill shows better the
> distribution of these ossicles, though.  Another thing that the new road
> kill (the one described at SVP) shows is the presence of armored scutes in
> the pelvic region.
> 

Is `road kill'  the accepted colloquial term for fossil skin imprints?

> What Bakker may not be off track with is the idea that, while diplodocoids
> probably used their whip-like tails as weapons, brachiosaurids and
> camarasaurids would be better suited for some hellacious bites.  Both
> Brachiosaurus and Camarasaurus have very powerfully constructed teeth and a
> decent gape, so they could potentially take out quite a chunk of flesh from
> a predator.  (Or course, I still think that size was the major defense for
> all sauropods).
> 
> On a related topic, I imagine that the bite of a ceratopsian was even more
> severe, what with their shearing teeth and hypertrophied jaw muscles.
> Maybe not the mainline of defense, but certain a powerful backup.

The famous Velociraptor and Protoceratops found in a deadly embrace,
with P's jaws clamped around V's forearm and V's clawed foot where P's
belly would have been, supports this.  V didn't stick its arm into P's
mouth on purpose -- P must have intentionally caught V's arm, implying
it could have been a `standard' defense behaviour.

  Mike Bonham        bonham@jade.ab.ca
``Organization is the enemy of improvisation.'' -- Beaverbrook