User talk:Stacy Glover

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Welcome to WP:DINO
Welcome to WikiProject Dinosaurs, Stacy! Best wishes and happy editing, Firsfron of Ronchester  19:08, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

T. rex
Hi Stacy! To answer a few of your questions...

I personally think that T. rex speed varied with age. Rather than things like posture, the main factor that determines how fast a bipedal animal can run is the ratio between the metatarsal length and tibia length. Animals with a low ratio cannot run as fast as animals with a high ratio. Ostriches have one of the highest ratios of any dinosaur, and I don't think any non-avian dinosaur could run as fast as an ostrich. In tyrannosaurs, interestingly, the ratio got lower as the animal aged. Juvenile tyrannosaurs have leg ratios identical to ornithomimids, the fastest non-avian dinosaurs. But as the rex grew, its proportions changed and probably could not run as fast. This implies to me that young T. rex were hunt-and chase predators, seeing as how almost all the herbivores in their environment were quite slow.

I don't think any paleontologists, aside from Jack Horner, believe in an either-or feeding strategy for T. rex. Almost everybody else thinks they were both hunters and scavengers, depending on opportunity. In modern animals, there is no such thing as a pure hunter, and the only pure scavenger is the vulture, which has the benefit of flight to cover enormous regions of land in search of carcases, something T. rex did not have, despite their equally awesome sense of smell. There is evidence that T. rex was somewhat social, though I think the whole idea of wolf-like packs in dinosaurs is a little mammal biased--as a recent paper on supposed raptor pack hunting pointed out, pack hunting (at least the way wolves do it) is never observed outside mammals. A "pack" of dinosaurs would be much more like a "pack" of predatory birds, much less tightly coordinated, but still exhibiting some degree of cooperation (though evidence from both raptors and rexes indicates this cooperation would have only been opportunistic, as both are known to have attacked other members of their own "pack", so the term "mob" might be better). However, given the differences between adult and juvi rexes in terms of speed, I still have to wonder if there's something to the theory where the young do the active hunting and the adults either cooperate with, or scavenge from, the young, and travel in loose social groups.

I think it's a safe bet that dinosaurs had komodo-like bacteria in their mouths, but I don't think that would have been an effective method of hunting, since the prey would have taken days or weeks to die of infection. Probably just a nice bonus that may have left a few carcases around for opportunistic scavengers. Anyway, thanks for your comments and welcome to wiki!

Always good to have more fellow dino-obsessives around here ;) Dinoguy2 01:02, 2 August 2007 (UTC)