Re: Tyrannosaur age-population distributions

[Dann Pigdon <dannj@alphalink.com.au>]

Quoting Phillip Bigelow <bigelowp@juno.com>:

> It's hard to wrap my mind around why we don't have *any* (to my
> knowledge) isolated
> Tyrannosaurus/Daspletosaurus/Gorgosaurus/Albertosaurus bones from animals
> of, say, 1.0 meter size, already in museum collections.  To be sure, most
> deceased babies and toddlers probably passed through the digestive tracts
> of predators, but some isolated elements should have been washed into
> channel deposits by floods and were preserved.

Maybe tyrannts grew so fast that the window of opportunity for young  
juveniles to be fossilised was too small.

Then of course there's the possibility that their grieving  
parents/siblings weren't too grief-stricken to chow down on their dead  
young'uns as soon as they hit the dirt. Certainly birds such as gulls  
see 'food' instead of 'friend' once a fellow flock-mate keels over.


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Dann Pigdon
GIS / Archaeologist         http://heretichides.soffiles.com
Melbourne, Australia        http://www.geocities.com/dannsdinosaurs
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