Re: T. REX THE HUNTER(finding cover)

["Jaime Headden" <jaemei@hotmail.com>]

Betty wrote:

<If you put the cookie jar on a shelf over your head, it doesn't mean
Junior won't know where to look for it. And cookie jars don't REEK like 
a carcass would to a meat eater.>

Exactly.

All the more reason to eat as much of it as possible---and why not let 
Junior have a share? Presumably, with the local prey population numberin 
the wildebeest-size herds, a lion-like group of hunters would be the 
most effective means of regulating herd numbers. So, a few tyrannosaurs 
pack up, check out the honking, squawking food over the hill, and plan 
who-ll they'll hit, preferably one of the bigger ones, or if anything a 
few sickly or young ones that so foolishly decided to ignore Mommy's 
warnings and go off investigate those strange toothy animals over the 
next rise. Then WHAM! out come three or four tyrannosaurs, two taking on 
the junior hadro while the others assault the herd itself, stampeding 
it, and succesfully taking down one of the big ones, slightly sick, and 
suffering from an interesting tail wound that left part of the tail 
gangrenous from infection.... Pity they'll have to leave the delicious 
tail alone.

But then the four tyrannosaurs, probably pairs or a group of females, 
start to gorge on the edmontosaur; after a while, the matriarch or 
leader of this small, temporary band honks out loudly (sans JP and LW) 
to call Junior and friends, and there come all those little yearling 
tyrannosaurs, hungry and willing to feed their little 2.5 cubic-feet 
bellies full (hypothetical).

After the meal, the group, probably having hunted togther before and 
being in the same territory as a dominant bull rex (making the juveniles 
likely half-siblings), say their loud goodbyes, and depart the pair of 
corpses. They go their separate ways, and a year later, a flashflood 
buries both skeletons. A million years later, erosion takes the juvenile 
hadrosaur the way of the dodo, and the last is buried for thousands of 
millenia, until some mammal comes along and digs it out of the group, 
pokes and prods it with a toothpick (which peculiarly doesn't seem to be 
a picking tooth) and manages to haul the thing to its den where years 
later several other mammals ruminate together on the possibility of why 
that edmontosaur died.

And that's how it was unlikely a rex would hide anything that big and 
smelly from a creature with olfactory bulbs the size of golf balls.

Jaime A. Headden

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