Re: late night thoughts: misunderstand what?

[Sam Barnett <sam.horus@gmail.com>]

"Their teeth and their skull biomechanics. Tyrannosaurs look more like
they took time to place a bite in a convenient position and then
thoroughly crunched their prey..."

What is your interpretation of the apparently healed bite marks in the
tail of Edmontosaurus and the illium of Triceratops - don't these
suggest that Tyrannosaurus could grapple something and run?  OK maybe
it was the Edmontosaurus doing the running in the first instance, but
I do know that if I'd just bitten the back end of a live Triceratops I
wouldn't want to still be there when its front end turned around.

On 6/14/07, David Marjanovic <david.marjanovic@gmx.at> wrote:
> (While we're mentioning "late-night thoughts"... I was asked if I'd mind
> explaining, and I answered "sure". That's not what I meant, obviously.)
>
> > > Tyrannosaurids don't look at all like specialized
> > > sauropod-hunters. From such an animal I'd expect the ability to
> > > make huge wounds in a short time and then retreat. This is what
> > > carnosaurs, especially carcharodontosaurids, look
> > > like. Tyrannosaurs were pursuit-and-bite predators.
> >
> > That's an interesting perspective.  What features of allosauroids make
> > them more suited for wound-and-retreat than tyrannosaurs?
>
> Their teeth and their skull biomechanics. Tyrannosaurs look more like they
> took time to place a bite in a convenient position and then thoroughly
> crunched their prey. This should kill or at least immobilize most animals up
> to the tyrannosaur's own size pretty quickly and with a high success rate,
> but looks like an unnecessary risk when the prey is twice as long and tall
> as the predator.
>
> > No arguments here!  I wish more of the recentish spate of WWD-like
> > dinosaur documentaries would show a theropod getting comprehensively
> > splattered by a sauropod.  The world needs more of that kind of thing.
>
> =8-)