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Child Item

T.rex Teens Were Fighters

Galvasean

Hot on the heels of the Gorgosaurus savage face biting incident, it has emerged that even juvenille Tyrannosaurs rex engaged in fights which could leave them horribly disfigured.

As Jane's deformed skull proves, these battles were more dangerous than the playful mock fights staged by other animals, such as wolf pups, dogs, kittens and lion cubs.

"Crocs and birds are less forgiving," he said. "Any sizeable population of alligators or crocodiles is very likely to have members missing fingers, toes, limbs, parts of tail or even parts of the face due to aggressive interaction."

What is also interesting is that reseach into this incident seems to disprove a recent theory that T.rex suffered from a parasitic disease.

Peterson does not believe Jane suffered a similar fate, since the parasite, which also affects modern birds, only infests the lower jaw. Jane's injuries orient beyond that part of her head.

You can read the full article here.

Illustration by Erica Lyn Schmidt

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Comments

Midnight_EG

Rawr means I love you in dinosaur

EDIT: I though this was After Hours for some reason :S (Saw it on the front page), sorry.

Jako8

Seems plausible since nearly all species of animals enter in play fights.

Galvasean

Jako8 wrote: »

Seems plausible since nearly all species of animals enter in play fights.

But this was far more than play. They would leave wounds which left each other disfigured for life. That's our T.rex, more aggresive than the av-er-age bear!
Interestingly, eagle chicks do something similar. If there are say 3 chicks, the stronger two will gang up on the runt and kill him, leaving more food/parental care for them. They mentioned that sort of behaviour in Walking With Dinosaurs.

I wonder if this kind of ferocious in-fighting among juvenilles was common among any other families of meat eating dinosaur, or was it rare, or even exclusive to tyrannosaurs? If the latter is the case, I can only imagine this in built fury was one of the things that made them so successful. Perhaps tehy were just taht bit meaner than the opposition.
A bit like the Spartans of the dinosaur world. :cool:

Galvasean

Galvasean wrote: »

A bit like the Spartans of the dinosaur world. :cool:

a nerdy step too far? I would tend to agree

Galvasean

More evidence of tyrannosaur face biting. This time it was Albertosaurus. Interestingly, the dino in question survived at least one such incident!
http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/dinosaur/2011/04/what-tales-do-albertosaurus-injuries-tell/

Alvin T. Grey

And in other news the Smithsonian confirmed today that water is indeed wet, finally putting to rest the great "Soggy" debate.

They were:

A) T-Rex.

T-nagers.

Of course they fought.

Think about it, the animal was physically large enough to contend for kills, sexually mature so rutting may have been a possibility ath this age. If they were younger or older and it came to competition most animals sort out dominance through posturing, and thus actually fight less. Considering where the damage is, and considering the T-Rexs only viable weapon, it's not surprising that most of the offensive/defensive wounds would be in this area. However it still doesn't disprove that Rexs also suffered from parasitic infestation.