RE: Regarding Spinosaurus

["Christopher Lavers" <Chris.Lavers@nottingham.ac.uk>]

Sorry , I'm rather an outsider concerning dinosaurs, too....
 
>If spinosaurids were  "high metabolic", however, it is difficult to 
>envisage a strictly scavenging habit. As Greg Paul wrote, today we have 
>no  terrestrial  "pure" scavengers, because looking for carcasses is 
>energetically too expensive if you cannot fly high and look over very wide 
>areas in a time (unless there was plenty of corpses in the Cretaceous).

If they were 'high metabolic' it is even more difficult (at least for me) to 
imagine them as piscivores - how many big-bodied, freshwater, warm-blooded, 
obligate fisheaters does anyone know of? (Some probably incorrect speculations 
on why freshwaters tend to be dominated by big coldies can be found in ch7 of 
my book, for those of you sad enough to own a copy.)

Best to all
Chris