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Posted by meretseger on April 11, 2003 at 01:51:53:
In Reply to: Croc skeleton? posted by Burmuda on April 10, 2003 at 21:01:20:
It's too bad, I wrote a very similar paper in high school, and there's a book at my local library which talks a lot about femurs and tibias. Unfortunately, I don't think you should be comparing an aquatic predator that doesn't have erect posture to our friend T. rex. There was a successful terrestrial croc back in the Eocene or something, I wonder what its tibias looked like. Maybe you could compare T. rex to modern mammalian hunters and ground living birds? Also, remember that most predators alive today, including crocs and puppy dogs, have a great sense of smell. T. rex not only had a good sense of smell, but also binocular vision, pretty useless if it was just a big vulture. I was just watching a TV show called 'The Ultimate Guide to T. rex' where they showed a spot on a hadrosaur skeleton where a large carnivore (obviously T.) had bitten a piece off the tail, but the bone had regrown around it. That's good evidence! Ummm... also make sure you check out a book called 'The Dinosaur Hearsies' by Robert Bakker. It's old, but good info. Also, keep in mind that there is not ONE ground based vertebrate animal today that's purely a scavenger. Well, there's probably one, but I can't think of it. If the niche of ground based scavenger could support a gigantic animal like T. rex 65 million years ago, you think there would be ONE species on, say, the African plains in that role. Nope. Hyenas are HUNTERS, too.
I mean, how would it have competed with Quetzalcoatlus?
Geesh.
