T.rex: Hunter or scavenger?

Rubecula · 05-02-2011 12:22pm

Whatever T. Rex was it was very successful. So I am not sure that it actually matters what it prefered in eating, it survived until the great extinction, and many other related species around the world survived equally as well.

Put it this way, the Great white shark a successful modern predator, does it scavange or hunt? It does both, and it is a successful strategy. T.Rex probably did that too, it had the capabilities as far as we know to do so.

Rubecula · 06-02-2011 8:48am

Strangely, after posting I watched a tv show about this very subject last night.

Triceratopsian remains have been found with T.Rex bites on them that have partially healed indicating the Triceratops was hunted down...(but survived)

If it survived the attack then it was obviously alive when T.Rex went after it. IE it hunted.

But there is no reason to say it didn't scavenge too. (Maybe like the Komodo dragon does???)

Galvasean · 06-02-2011 1:24pm

If you look at modern day animals there is virtually no land based carnivore of reasonable size that does not do a mixture of both. A little known fact is that hyenas hunt more oten than lions do and that lions scavenge from hyena kills more often than is the reverse! (suddenly the Lion King doesn't look so black and white)
Even the lowly vulture has been known to kill small and/or heavily injured/sick animals.

marco_polo · 22-02-2011 10:42pm

Looks like Jack horner is trolling the forum again

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110222140550.htm

The ferocious Tyrannosaurus rex has been depicted as the top dog of the Cretaceous, ruthlessly stalking herds of duck-billed dinosaurs and claiming the role of apex predator, much as the lion reigns supreme in the African veld.

But a new census of all dinosaur skeletons unearthed over a large area of eastern Montana shows that Tyrannosaurus was too numerous to have subsisted solely on the dinosaurs it tracked and killed with its scythe-like teeth.

Instead, argue paleontologists John "Jack" Horner from the Museum of the Rockies and Mark B. Goodwin from the University of California, Berkeley, T. rex was probably an opportunistic predator, like the hyena in Africa today, subsisting on both carrion and fresh-killed prey and exploiting a variety of animals, not just large grazers.

"In our census, T. rex came out very high, equivalent in numbers to Edmontosaurus, which many people had thought was its primary prey," said Horner, curator of paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Mont., and Regents Professor at Montana State University. "This says that T. rex is not a cheetah, it's not a lion. It's more like a hyena."

Kess73 · 25-02-2011 6:14pm

marco_polo wrote: »

Looks like Jack horner is trolling the forum again

So Horner thinks it is now more like a hyena than a Lion?

Well by saying that, he is saying it is more of a hunter than a scavenger as the hyena scavange less than lions do.

Galvasean · 25-02-2011 7:56pm

How the hell can Jack the quack still stand by this scavenger notion when every slab of data by every other scientist in the business shows that it is simply not the case?
Like Kess said, Horner has overlooked the fact that hyenas kill more of their food than lions do. Ad hyenas to the list of things Jack Horner knows diddly squat about.
Honorary paleontologist my ass!

edit: haven't read the article in full yet. Will do after dinner so I can dismember it.

Rubecula · 26-02-2011 11:34am

Was watching a documentaryon Discovery the other evening, it was about pack behaviour in predators and it seems from fossil evidence that most if not all of the big predators of the dino period were likely to act in packs of one sort or another, the example used were T.rex (and related species) and Giganotosaurus (excuse spelling on that one) the large South American predator. They looked at fossile evidence that not only shows these creatures in family groups but also the prey. Sauropods were not safe from a pack apparently, although T.Rex could not crunch through the massive bones of a sauropod. Method of killing SEEMS to be lots of biting until prey died from blood loss (or infection as in Komodo dragon). Saropods it is surmised could not fight back against a pack, nor run away fast enough to escape.

It was on Discovery as I said, so I have no idea how accurate this is, but it does seem reasonable.

Galvasean · 08-03-2011 1:00am

A concise round up of the history of the debate:
http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/dinosaur/2011/03/tyrannosaurus-hyena-of-the-cretaceous/#more-5008

Alvin T. Grey · 31-03-2011 3:13pm

Where is the "I'm sure it was both" option?

Alvin T. Grey · 31-03-2011 3:58pm

Sorry.

Seeing that the poster took the time to pose the question and ask for an opinion, I suppose I'd better flesh that last post out.

This is my opinion and I don't speak from any kind of authority, so here goes.

From research online (yes that includes Youtube....) I understand that the marker for what an animal ate was in the type of teeth it evolved. Yes?
Long thin, serrated teeth were best suited to carving flesh. If they hit bone, then byebye tooth. Those belonged to preditors whose prey was big and meaty.

Thick spiked teeth were ment for crunching and crushing. I think this had to do with the fact that T-Rex main prey was a lot smaller and more armoured.

Does this not also raise an interesting question:
If your teeth break on striking bone, then you tend only to eat muscle tissue and organs, leaving most of the rest of the item intact(ish). If so then the opposite is true, if you have the teeth for crunching bone, then you also have the ability to eat more of the prey. So where does this bring us....

If you have to survive on what food you can gather, then an important equasion comes into play. - Calories in Vs Calories out. - Just ask Bear Grylls (idiot). That equasion has never changed.

So if a T-Rex came across a handy source of protien, which took no effort to attain, he ate it. If he came across a kill being eaten by another smaller preditor, he bullied it away, then ate it.
But those two scenarios are as much a matter of chance than anything else, so in the interim, he hunted and we know he hunted.

Galvasean · 31-03-2011 11:47pm

Well I'll be damned... I CAN edit polls.

T.rex: Hunter or scavenger?

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