Re: late night thoughts: misunderstand what?

[don ohmes <d_ohmes@yahoo.com>]

"..but looks like an unnecessary risk when the prey is twice as long and tall 
as the predator." --DM

What is risky about reaching up and grabbing a sauropod by the neck, if you 
match the physical description of a tyrannosaur? If your hold is 2m behind the 
head, you are 8m away from the front feet. Even that assumes no injury to the 
spine of the prey item, which would result in instant incapacitation of the 
prey. 

It 'looks like' to me like you are characterizing prey/predator interactions on 
the basis of sheer intuition, and are overly impressed by simple size 
differential.

Don

----- Original Message ----
From: David Marjanovic <david.marjanovic@gmx.at>
To: DML <dinosaur@usc.edu>
Sent: Thursday, June 14, 2007 6:18:42 AM
Subject: Re: late night thoughts: misunderstand what?

(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-)