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Tyrannosaur hunter-gatherers?
I haven't really paid a lot of attention to the scavenger-predator
debate over Tyrannosaurus, as it seems that they could have been a
combination of both (depending on the circumstances, scarcity of food,
etc.). But something just occurred to me---has sexual dimorphism been
discussed in this context?
If we can't yet determine the "sex" of individual dinosaurs, is it not
conceivable that male and female members of T. rex may have had different
roles. Perhaps one sex was a faster predator and the other sex was more of
a scavenger. This was the case with early humans, in which hunting and
gathering (including scavenging?) were largely governed by a division of
labor between the sexes.
So perhaps Horner is partially right, but only about one of the sexes
of Tyrannosaurus. Until we can sex them, how can we really know for sure?
We ran into this same problem when discussing Maiasaura nesting (and the
"day-care" hypothesis). Sexual dimorphism can fool us in a lot of different
ways, especially when we only have fossil evidence to work with.
------ Ken
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