Re: Tyrannosaur hunter-gatherers?

["David Marjanovic" <david.marjanovic@gmx.at>]

>      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.).

Now that's semantics -- this combination is called "predator". All living
predators whose behavior is known to some extent do both, except the
cheetahs which are too weak to defend a carcass.
        *Tyrannosaurus* was able to run fast (just look at it, it was more
cursorial than *Giganotosaurus*, and if the speed estimate for the
latter...), and able to kill something big and dangerous. Why shouldn't it
have done that?

> 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 implies that the sexes were radically different -- especially that one
was able to soar like a vulture :-) Pure scavenging is just not feasible for
earthbound animals.
        There's a philosophical book called "The truth is not in the
middle". A compromise between conflicting hypotheses can be correct, but a
priori the compromise is no more probable than any other possibility.