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Pack-Hunting Dinosaurs Found As Large As T-Rex
1369IC writes "The Washington Post is reporting that the recently unearthed Mapusaurus roseae was as large as a T-Rex and may have hunted in packs. The fossils were found in Patagonia, in Argentina, though not enough were found to reconstruct an entire specimen. The meat-eaters probably lived in the same time and place as the 125-foot-long Argentinosaurus, the largest known dinosaur." From the article: "T. rex was equipped to attack and destroy animals its own size, Currie said, but Mapusaurs perhaps could 'go in, strike, pull and see what to do next,' a strategy that could work against larger animals, especially if the predators attacked together -- the prehistoric equivalent of a pack of wolves cornering a bison."
We need a PhD in Dinosaur Psychology here.
Yeah, blame capitalism. This wouldn't even have been discovered without it. I am sure this is the first time, ever, something was named after a person. Ever.
"The problem, though, is that when you have only one incidence you really don't know what's going on."
So the herd idea is just that, an idea.
Common sense is not so common
Well, wasn't the Tyrannosaurus rex named after the ancient king who had it found? ;)
...proposed that some larger macropredators would have needed to revert from predation to scavenging in adulthood is guilty of dumbassery of the highest order.
A very simple counter-example exists. Watch a documentary about a large, muscle-bound, lumbering grizzly bear snatching a leaping fish out of thin air.
Otherwise a neat find marred by an article economical on content.
-GleeMany a true word hath been spoken in jest -- mod funny posts "Informative".
This is commonly mentioned on the Science Channel.
The world will not get better through technology. We must seek to be better people.
I don't see how they came to the conclusion they hunted in packs. I think "Pack Hunting Dinosaurs" is a little misleading.
Steve -- http://tail-f.net/
Perhaps, given sufficient numbers, prehistoric cockroaches could take out much larger animals, too...like the T-Rex.
Aah...that would be a sight to see.
Take it to the limit, everybody to the limit, come on, everybody fhqwhgads.
Did anyone else read that and think 'SCO'?
I can see it now... dozens of dinos screaming at a pack member to learn to pull :)
So, is your first name pronounced "dotBruce", "periodBruce" or "stopBruce"? Or is the punctuation silent?
-Glee
Many a true word hath been spoken in jest -- mod funny posts "Informative".
Yeah, and every woman is equipped to be a hooker. The facts on T-Rex show the animal very unlikely to have been a predator. The general concensus of the predation deissenters is that the T-Rex eyes were small and likely couldn't have seen and tracked prey; the arms were too small to hold prey, and its oversized legs would slow the beast too much to be a decent predator. This last point may not be as important considering some of the larger species couldn't move very fast themselves, but getting big is what species do to avoid predation and we have living examples in elephants, girraffes, rhinoceri, hippopotami and whales.
Furthermore no bones which display healed T-Rex tooth marks have ever been found, and T-Rex was around right up until the little rock slapped this big rock we live on now some 65M years ago.
Given that, I'm loathe to accept some conjecture about some other animal that supposedly lived and hunted in packs based on the spurious evidence of a group of bones comprising many species members and none of which comprise more than 80% of a single animal.
Many elephants go to "elephant graveyards" to die; will scientists in 60 million years stumble across one of these graveyards, see the tusks and the size of the animals and conclude the elephant was a vicious carnivore which hunted in packs? And will that era's Slashdot splash such spurious findings on the front page?
woof.
"the recently unearthed Mapusaurus roseae was as large as a T-Rex and may have hunted in packs
[...]
the prehistoric equivalent of a pack of wolves cornering a bison"
Yikes - where's this fossilized bison that's 10x as big as a T. Rex?
--
make install -not war
Speaking of science, it is nice how these folks can find a collection of bones from seven or eight animals and create a whole set of hunting behaviors and lifestyles. The scientists admit this is conjecture, but fortunately, the reporters and editors writing these stories don't let a little science get in the way of just writing the juicy bits.
Scientists long ago ran out of names for "Big Meat-Eating Mofo".
--- Attorneys Assisting Citizen-Soldiers & Families -
um,do you realize what most of those "scientific" names are if you translate the latin? Sacred Lizard, King Tyrant Lizard, Bird Robber, Thunder Lizard, Different Lizard......really heavy intellectual meaning and description there! Using part of a person's name is no worse.
Googlemapusaurus!!~~~!!
- Andrew
I meta-moderate because I care.
For more lighthearted biological names that you ever dreamed were possible, check out Curiousities of Biological Nemenclature
My personal favourite (relevent, too!) is "Tyrannasorus rex Ratcliffe and Ocampo, 2001 (Miocene hybosorid scarab from Dominican amber) The dinosaur is spelled Tyrannosaurus." Tyrant King beetle?
of course, biting monkeys is not to everyone's taste - Konrad Lorenz
Am I the only one who saw a trailer for Jurassic Park 4 beginning to flash before my eyes as I read this ?-)
Hey, let's make even better ! Let's make Star Wars Episode 7, complete with a final battle with a whole fleet of Death Stars (Death Cluster ?-) !
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
With a name like that (tyrant king lizard), it wouldn't have been much of a complement.
:-) Such attempts are usually frowned upon -- if they are noticed.
No, it was named by Osborn to be descriptive. There's no requirement that names be descriptive. Naming things after people or places is common, and usually a bit of an honor, although it could be a biological joke to name something after somebody who looks a bit like the creature in question, or name something ugly after someone you don't like
Sometimes fictional names are used, like the fossil snake Monty pythonoides .
It's been my understanding that it's considered very poor taste for a discoverer of a new species of anything to name it after himself or herself. It's common to name a new species for things like the region it was deiscovered in, the person who's land it was found on, or other persons who were significant to the discovery, directly involved or not. Doesn't seem much like capitalism to me, so much as a little gratitude to those who made the discovery possible.
What are you smoking?
I'm working with class Ophiuroidea right now- brittlestars. The genus name is "ophiactidae", so if I ever discover a new species? I'm naming it "snap", so that textbooks will have to type O. snap for hundreds of years into the future.
Imagine there's no heaven.
The Dinos pre-date God. What does that tell you?
Would Welcome our Big Meat-Eating Mofoasarus overlords.
Archeologists should share their findings under the GPL, so that other scientists may asses the data and draw their own conclusions.
That was called peer review last time I checked.
These guys sound like a perfect "3rd faction to join the fight" plot twist for the surely on its way live action Transformers 2: Dinobot Island!
Here's a fact: Lions hunt in packs. Tigers hunt alone.
I'd love to be proven wrong, but I doubt there is any way you can tell that from looking at their skeletons, or even a dead body.
Animal fossils can tell us a lot about past species. But there is also a lot they can't possibly tell us.
I have no doubt that Perens would go public with his new invention of monomolecular monofilament or room-temperature superconductivity before he applied for the patent.
Anyway, I prefer, the wooly lemur avahi cleesei, named for John Cleese, and having an ironically funny walk.
(1) eyes are relatively smaller in larger animals. Adult humans have smaller eyes than infants, for example. T. rex and other large, carnivorous dinosaurs have relatively small eyes, but that's exactly as you'd expect. (2) plenty of animals manage to take down prey just fine without the use of arms. Sharks and crocodiles, for instance. (3) Concerning healed wounds, plenty of broken and healed bones are found. The problem: how do you tell it was T. rex that did it? Some healed breaks have been identified as the work of T. rex, but other people are skeptical. After all, it's not as if the bones come with a "This bone was broken by T. rex" stamp. Short of having a tooth actually get lodged in the bone and then seeing some healing taking place (not impossible, but very improbable) we can't know for sure how these bones got broken. (4)This is not the only instance of large groups of carnivorous dinosaurs being found together. There's a site currently being worked in Alberta with over a dozen tyrannosaurs. (5) Elephant graveyards are a myth
Trudat!
Comet Halley was named after Edmon Halley
Bones can be surprisingly informative when it comes to the most probable means of locomotion, diet, etc etc etc. However, it does start to get rather fuzzy when social aspects are involved; not that the reporters care.
"I should know, I invented open source. Information should be free, be it a program, knowledge, or newly discovered data."
y _disorder.
Judging by your posts you must suffer by accute http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociative_identit
Scientific peer review is the phrase you've been looking for. God man grow up or go assume another person's identity on a less involved forum.
Whatever happened to naming species after something...I dunno....scientific?
Like, say, the woman who funded the research that discovered this new dinosaur species? Sounds like a pretty scientific naming convention to me. After all, without her interest and support, the thing wouldn't be getting named at all.
And really, who cares? The discoverer gets the credit, the financier gets the name, and the whole world gets the scientific discovery itself. Sounds like win-win, not win-whine, to me.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
I don't think there's a consensus on this issue; only one palentologist, Jack Horner, seems to be making this claim. While some of his assertions make sense (the ability to sniff a carcass, limits on upper speed, etc..) T-Rex had binocular vision which is normally the mark of a predator.
In addition, the two feeding styles aren't exclusive: modern predators are certainly willing to still other's kills and just generally scavenge when they have to - and while your remark about no healed wounds seems to be widely claimed, I also found this:
In the Sue excavation site, an Edmontosaurus annectens skeleton was also found with healed tyrannosaur-inflicted scars. The fact that the scars seem healed suggests active predation instead of scavenging a previous kill.
Also, why would T-Rex need such a formidable jaw if it was only scavenging and not killing?
Clear, Dark Skies
Now, this explains why Armando Diego Maradona kept scoring his goals with his hands!!!
Honestly, dinosaurs are great stuff for the imagination and for science. I think funding for physical sciences benefits from stories about MassiveTeethOSaurus. I agree that many conjectures, assumptions, and claims (in articles like these) tend to be very imaginative compared to the hard facts known.
With all that said, dinosaurs have always been really interesting to me. (Often) big, different, not around any more, lack of details (the mystery), (did I mention many of the cool ones were BIG? Well, maybe compys are pretty cool, too...) - all good ingredients for imaginative fuel. I digress. Sorry...
I always take news releases and articles like these with a grain of salt. Much of the publicized (read: made more interesting and made less dry) aspects of dig findings are generally lots of intelligent conjecture. That's OK with me, provided that folks don't assign the gloss (of the articles) to be factual. Did they hunt in packs? Did they hunt or scavenge? Were they gray or were they colorful? Some things we may never know... but for now, discoveries like these are just like candy - lots of fun.
A Passionate Independent Musician
This wouldn't even have been discovered without it.
I'm sure a Communist Archealogist could have found a dinosaur, but they would have named it "Stalin-saurus" or maybe "The People's Dinosaur".
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
It's perfectly acceptible to name things whatever you want. There is currently a strain of bacteria that was discovered in the early 90s called Salmonella mjordan. Google if you think I'm making it up :)
I'm not sure how Mike feels about having a disease-causing organism named after him, but there you go.
[Whoever] proposed that some larger macropredators would have needed to revert from predation to scavenging in adulthood is guilty of dumbassery of the highest order. A very simple counter-example exists. Watch a documentary about a large, muscle-bound, lumbering grizzly bear snatching a leaping fish out of thin air.
Obviously you know very little about predators. First and foremost, grizzlies are not "muscle-bound and lumbering", they are surprisingly quick and agile, and I'm willing to bet your life that you can't outrun one. I've seen film of a grizzly outrunning and catching a young elk. They have excellent reflexes, as evidenced by your fish-snatching example, but what do they catch when the salmon stop running, when the caribou have moved on for the winter, there are no berries or small game available? That's right, like almost all known large terrestrial predators, they revert to scavenging for carrion. Lions do it, wolves do it, eagles do it, they all do it. If it came down to the difference between pungent roadkill and starvation, you'd do it too. Nature isn't some Cordon Bleu restaurant where predators can send back something they don't like; they take what they can when they can get it.
There are schools of thought that believe that very large theropods (T. Rex, Giganotosaurus etc) simply grew too large as adults to be active predators, and subsisted on the colossal carcasses of dead herbivores. Others believe that like many modern predators, their lifestyles were a mixture of active hunting (probably from ambush because an animal that size couldn't sneak up on prey) and scavenging for carrion. They weren't likely to pass up a free meal, particularly when they didn't have to risk life and limb to get it.
The discovery of Mapusaurus roseae is indeed very exciting, because it offers the tantilizing possibility that these very large theropod dinosaurs were pack hunters. Which, if you think about, makes a lot of sense. It doesn't matter how large the predator is, if its prey is that much larger it would make sense that they would cooperate to bring it down. Lions are an excellent example. Young males who have been forced out of their prides are much more likely to survive if two or three of them cooperate and hunt, than if they try to go it alone. The reason is that three lions (there is a lot of evidence that three will do much better than two) have a much better chance of bringing down prey large enough to feed all three well, than a single lion has of catching enough prey to even survive.
from TFA "But Currie said the Argentine deposit had the remains of at least seven animals from 18 feet to 40 feet long, suggesting they may have been a herd or family in which different group members could provide either speed or strength." and ""The river was running very fast when they were buried in it," Currie said. "It was a single event in a short amount of time." Currie said the deposit did not contain the bones of any other species of dinosaur, a rare occurrence for meat-eaters." Its not difficult to reach the conclusion that they also hunted in packs, when they traveled and died in packs, in this case at least 7 of them. This is the same evidence used to indicate that many herbiverous dinosaurs traveled in herds.
"It's been my understanding that it's considered very poor taste for a discoverer of a new species of anything to name it after himself or herself."
:-)
Yes, but you can always "accidentally" create a junior homonym, and then someone else will propose a replacement named after you to memorialize your mistake
"The meat-eaters probably lived in the same time and place as the 125-foot-long Argentinosaurus"
And people accuse us yanquis of hubris?
Did it inhabit the Malvinas?
. . . and craters named John, Paul, George and Ringo.
Jealous because nothing will ever be named after you, huh?
and in palentology, the names are mostly SFW... in botany, that's clear out the window... as an only borderline NSFW example, i'd point you to genus mammillaria
How come we don't have a cool dinosaur icon?
I would disagree. The other names you mentioned were at least descriptive, rather than being for promotional purposes. I'd much rather see names like "Flying Thunder Pigeon", than names like "Found-by-Gary-osaurus".
The one exception would be if they found a roundhouse kicking dinosaur. Then, and only then, would I make an exception for this Chuck-Norris-osaurus.
This argument is made particularly for the human species and its relations. Neanderthal skeletons showing extreme arthritis, healed broken bones that would have incapacitated the individual at least for hunting, and that kind of thing are used as a simple example of social characteristics one can see in the physical evidence. They cared for their injured and infirm. You can see it right there in the leg bone.
People new to fossil evidence are so often naive about how much it can show. Nope, the mammoths have molars like an herbivore. Duh. (The world of the evolution deniers is full of ludicrous arguments about Homo erectus being a subspecies of pygmies and that kind of thing, all of which prey on that naivete.)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Ever since Linnaeus came up with the modern taxonomical system, it's been one of the rewards of research to get to name a new species anything you want. That motivation drove a good many gentlemen science hobbyists in the 19th century to seek out and classify new animals at home and across the world for the pleasure of getting to name it whatever they felt like. The only frowned upon thing is to name if after yourself.
If the researcher who did this felt enough gratitude to his sponsor to name it after her, then good for him. It's not like anyone's making him do it. It's a sincere way of saying thanks.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I hadn't considered bone cracking as a possibility.
Clear, Dark Skies
At the end of the war the Empire had the Sun Crusher in development. It wouldnt just destroy a planet, but would cause a sun to nova and take out the whole system.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Although I have to imagine that with the smaller cranial capacity, T.Rex's hunting strategies were probably much simpler than those of modern cats.
Actually, on reflection, that actually supports your point - it's easy to imagine T.Rex having a simple pattern of "smell meat, locate meat, chase away anything between you and the meat, eat."
Clear, Dark Skies
Paleontology is full of crazy speculations that have very tentative grounds. When I was a kid, the biggest dinosaur known to man was the brontosaurus, which we later find was a mix of two or more sets of bones. Watch any Discovery Channel dinosaur documentary and you'll see that a fragment of a tooth gets extrapolated into an animal.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Stalin-saurus, that's just too scarey
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
As in "I'm Not Bruce Perens." As another post further down pleads, go assume another person's identity on a less involved forum.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
It's called dinosaur bocce. Choose a species of dinosaur to be your ball. Grab one with your noodly appendage. Roll it across a field. Repeat. In the end, you end up with a big pile of dead dinosaurs. Just don't ask me about the FSM's opponents. I really don't want to have to explain the Swimming Scallopini Squid or the Laughing Lasagna Lizard to you.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Seems like these very large dino-predators were more likely to use the hunting technique of the Komodo Dragon: simply run up and take a bite of your prey, and then follow it for 3 days while it dies of blood poisoning.
The Komodo's teeth are positively filled (in fact there's special grooves to retain the bacteria!) with pathogenic bacteria.
I wonder if these new dino's have similar grooves in their teeth?
We know from the math, that a predator of this size can't take too many falls, as their own weight is more than enough to crack ribs, and it'd be very easy for them to break a leg. I think I recall some T-Rex's having ribs which show healed breaks. It seems unlikely an 8-ton predator would have enough fat reserves to survive a broken leg bone, unless that is, they were fed by their family.
I wish I could go back to see the behaviour!
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
Just a hint: when sorting comments after rating, this ignorant idiot of parent still gets the first place with his +5 insightful blabering.
Maybe that should change?
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
And what would a bunch of archaeologists know about dinosaurs?
Slashdot: Where nerds gather to pool their ignorance
Uh, take a look at just about any checklist of scientific names. About half are named after a person. In fact, check out the cool newly described incredibly-long-necked sauropod Erketu ellisoni, named by paleontologist Mark Norell after his long-time illustrator Mick Ellison.
The road to hell is paved with Cat 5 cable.
Some revisionist paleontologists have claimed the T-Rex was just the "world's largest turkey buzzard", pointing to its massive olfactory brain center and its teeth which are more adapted to crushing bone than tearing flesh. They claim that it needed a very sharp sense of smell to find carrion, and that by being able to crush bone it was able to get nourishment other animals would leave behind, by eating bone marrow. This was coupled with studies which indicate it's unlikely the T-Rex could run at more than about 15 mph, far slower than modern top predators such as lions and tigers (and quite a bit less than the 40-to-45 mph seen in "Jurassic Park). They compared the T-Rex's keen olfactory sense with that of a turkey buzzard, which is a carrion eater. They claimed that the T-Rex lived exclusively on carrion, and the only reason it needed a large size was to chase off predators from their kills. However, even when I saw this theory being propounded I thought their arguments were shaky. Comparing the T-Rex to modern top predators such as lions and tigers is rather pointless. Okay so the T-Rex couldn't run as fast as a lion. So what? It wasn't trying to run down antelope and zebras as lions do. Its most likely prey was large and relatively slow herbivorous dinosaurs. If its prey could only run at, say, 10 to 12 mph then 15 mph would have been quite fast enuff to run them down. And altho top predators today have teeth adapted to tearing flesh, unlike the T-Rex's bone-crunching bite, again I don't see that's any indication the T-Rex wasn't adapted to be a predator. With its tall, upright stance and bone-crushing teeth, it would seem its likely hunting strategy would be to run up behind its prey and bite its backbone hard enuff to break it, thus paralyzing its victim. We do have one piece of evidence that a T-Rex tried this with a duckbill dinosaur; one skeleton was found with partially-healed holes in its backbone, and the holes were exactly the right shape and size for T-Rex teeth. The fact the wound was partially healed proves the bite was made while the duckbill was still alive. This is very strong evidence that at least occasionally the T-Rex hunted live prey, rather than depending on carrion. A hunting strategy of running up behind/beside the prey and biting its backbone hard enuff to crush bone seems to me to be a relatively good hunting strategy. I think it's a much safer approach than, say, the cheetah, which has to bite its prey in the throat and hang on until it suffocates. [The prey, not the cheetah :)] This is quite dangerous and may cause the cheetah to be injured.
Since I saw that revisionist theory, I saw another paleontologist who disputed the revisionists' claims the T-Rex had poor eyesight. He pointed out that the T-Rex had very large orbits (eye-sockets) and therefore very large eyes-- as accurately depicted in "Jurassic Park"-- and quite rightly said that animals with large eyes have very good eyesight. It's not just that larger eyes naturally give better eyesight; it's an indication the critter has a large investment in good eyesight. Eyes (or at least retinas and optic nerves) are grown from fragile and hard-to-repair nerve tissue, so are easily damaged. If a critter doesn't have a need for large eyes, evolution will quickly shrink them.
But the fatal "stomp" on the revisionists' theory came for me just recently when I saw an interview with the "bad boy" of paleontology, Robert Bakker. He said the T-Rex had the longest hind legs in proportion to body length of any predator that ever lived. That clinches it-- evolution would not have selected such an extreme adaptation unless the T-Rex had a "need for speed"! Carrion eaters don't need to run especially fast. Predators do.
Now that's not to say the T-Rex never ate carrion, in the sense of stealing another predator's kill. After all, lions get *most* of their food by stealing hyenas' kills, so in that sense it can be said the lion is primarily an eater of carrion. But the T-Rex was clearly capable of running down and killing prey, just as lions are.
So T-Rex can proudly reclaim its throne as the all-time heavyweight champ of land predators, just as we envisioned them when we were growing up. But with one noteable change-- they were covered with feathers!
What is your problem with that?
:-P
At least this is an original discovery.
Investigate the history of poinsettia o see how some USians just steal the names of things they did not discovered themselves
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
that's even worse, a description that evoke images of nice snuggly mammaries, but the reality is a face, mouth and handful of spikes! now mammilaria spicatus, that would be alot better.
loop {p "lovin\' ruby"}
Then you can analyze the relative size of the different areas, thus concluding wich senses were more developped.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
You are very unlikely to find fossils of 20 or 30 panthers in one place simply because they don't gather in such quantities.
You are more likely to find remains of lions in groups if a catastrophy (volcano eruption, sudden flood) catches them all up.
From this you can make some informed guesses.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Your Discovery Channel?
Your problem with paleontologists is that you don't understand how science works. In many scientific fields you have to especulate in order to do any useful work.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
And what would a bunch of archaeologists know about dinosaurs?
Don't piss them off, they're huge!
I quit!