Re: Tyrannosaur hunter-gatherers?

["SCHMIDT" <ashmidt@flash.net>]

Has Horner ever addressed the fact that there are no land based scavengers
in existance?  Even vultures sometimes kill live food, Lappet Faced Vultures
(the largest in Africa) can kill young antelope with their huge beaks.
Would it really be possible for there to be so many large plant eaters dying
from old age and disease that a viable population of Tyrannosaurs could be
maintained?  It certainly isn't possible today even when millions of
wildbeast migrate and I doubt large dinosaurs could reach as a large a
population in a given area as smaller hoofed mammals.  I'm only seventeen so
correct me if I'm way wrong on this stuff.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ken Kinman" <kinman@hotmail.com>
To: <dinosaur@usc.edu>
Sent: Sunday, October 07, 2001 4:58 PM
Subject: 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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