Slashdot Mirror
First Fossil Evidence That Velociraptors Hunted in Packs
Ponca City, We Love You writes "The New Scientist reports that palaeontologists have excavated a fossil trackway in Shandong Province in China 100 to 120 million years old that contains footprints left by six Dromeosaurs, the more formal name for raptors, showing evidence of group behavior. Up until now, the popular stereotype from Jurassic Park of raptors hunting in packs has had no fossil evidence to back it up. The paths of the six 90 kilo raptors do not overlap where the animals walked alongside a river or stream. '"The odds of these tracks being made by different individuals that just happen to be moving in the same direction, without their tracks stepping on one another, are small," said Jerry D. Harris, director of paleontology at Dixie State College. "Groups that do that usually have relatively sophisticated behavior, and they're relatively intelligent," Harris added. "By moving together in groups, it's entirely possible that they hunted in groups."'"
Who needs fossil evidence? Just watch the movie. See? Packs.
(I hope this doesn't get in the way of my thrice-weekly xkcd entertainment.)
let the XKCD references begin
seriously, i wish God would stop planting 'evidence' of dinosaurs, this is getting rather tiresome.
I'm a rabbit startled by the headlights of life
I wonder what other dinosaurs would be prey for the Utah raptor... as vicious as they may be, I'd imagine some might be still too big for them (except maybe calves)
Any evidence of hunting while in packs? They could had walked to their offices to work in packs, just like we do.
They were obediently following Adam and Eve around, and it was only 6000 years ago. Blasphemers!
Ok my karma is maxed out. When do I become Enlightened?
so velociraptors may have been pack hunters? thanks for the nightmares.
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
Nah... The movie that comes to my mind is completely different.
I am getting a picture of very clean cut, tall, dainty and somewhat immortal lithe man (with bow strapped across back, of course) darting back and forth across the plain. He sniffs here, looks there, describing what the signs indicate happened (all while you're seeing flashbacks to millions of years ago where the pack of raptors were hauling tail across the terrain with two little midget dinos tied to a couple raptors' backs because some dark T-Rex said "don't eat them".
That's some tracker...
Now all we need to find is some evidence of raptors being able to open up doors, and we'll have proof that Hollywood knows more about Dinosaurs than Science.
Gamertag: WyleType
is the number of slashdotters that simultaneous think they should attempt to post something witty using this number.
sigs... don't talk to me about sigs....
Even if you prove that they were together, it still does not mean they were hunting together. It is possible that they have just finished their end-sem examn and were hanging out together to relax with some beer around a camp fire. Or they were playing three a side basketball. Or just watching TV. Or they five of them were the chumps and the sixth one is the Amway salesraptor. There are so many possibilities, these guys are jumping to conclusion creating the image of vicious hunters and contaminating the jury pool.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Raptors were Chinese?
Has anyone considered the possibility that they just died together, huddled en masse in fear as humans came along to reft their land from them?
"Try to imagine yourself in the Cretaceous Period. You get your first look at this "six foot turkey" as you enter a clearing. He moves like a bird, lightly, bobbing his head. And you keep still because you think that maybe his visual acuity is based on movement like T-Rex, he'll lose you if you don't move. But no, not Velociraptor. You stare at him, and he just stares right back. And that's when the attack comes. Not from the front, but from the side, from the other two 'raptors you didn't even know were there. Because Velociraptor's a pack hunter, you see, he uses coordinated attack patterns and he is out in force today. And he slashes at you with this... a six-inch retractable claw, like a razor, on the the middle toe. He doesn't bother to bite your jugular like a lion, say... no no. He slashes at you here... or here... or maybe across the belly, spilling your intestines. The point is... you are alive when they start to eat you. So you know... try to show a little respect.
"
Sure baby, I'll give you my phone number...in Hex
.. with lots of free time and a sense of humor. :|
Seems to have won a number of educated guesses about how big dinosaurs were and how they acted. Its nice to see a film actually get things (more or less right).
The only thing that it seems they may come a cropper on is skin colouring and coating as it appears that velociraptors may have been feathered.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Clearly these dinosaurs weren't running millions of years ago and because they were hunting in packs... they were running 6000 years ago from great floods and packs of creationists. Even I didn't need to RTFA to know that.
Cheers, ~ Ruben
clever girl(s)
"The paths of the six 90 kilo raptors do not overlap where the animals walked alongside a river or stream. '"The odds of these tracks being made by different individuals that just happen to be moving in the same direction, without their tracks stepping on one another, are small," said Jerry D. Harris, director of paleontology at Dixie State College."
Wow, they must really be smart. They travel single-file, to conceal their number.
but they are not very good going after you if you hide in the ceiling tiles, they find kitchen floors slippery, and a good reflective aluminum surface should be good enough to give at least one of them a banged head
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"Amway salesraptor" Wow, that is scary. Almost as scary as a pair of bible punching Jehova's Witness raptors.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
http://x008.uploaderx.net/x/details/913_raptors.jpg
i love number 2
2. you are the center of a 20m equilateral triangle with a raptor at each corner. the top raptor has a wounded leg and is limited to a top speed of 10 m/s. the raptors run toward you. at what angle should you run to maximize the time you stay alive.
lose != loose
So why don't we build a facility to breed them from DNA extracted from mosquitoes trapped in Amber, run the place with Silicon Graphics workstations with some smart ass obese slovenly IT guy... Oh wait..
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
"They're moving in herds... they do move in herds!"
I live in the SF Bay Area. Where is the nearest place I can take my curious children to see full sized assembled dinosaur fossil skeletons? Thank you for the slightly off topic post.
Well, it's not planted as such. At some point the great game designer in the sky thought it would be fun to have some big stuff running around the high level areas. And some 90 kilo birds that He planned to use later as the Blood Elves' mount.
But you know how that ends up working. You tweak a little here, a little there, and next thing you know they're whining that you've nerfed them to death and start cancelling their subscriptions in droves.
So, you know, cut Him some slack. What do you expect Him to do? Hide that they ever existed? Like that ever works. Try deleting just a post or two on a board and you end up with a whole rebellion on your hand. Try denying that the game ever had dinosaurs? Ooer... noone does... ermm...
Well, OK, so Sony's propaganda machine does try to present the new animal breeding on SWG like some revolutionary new feature, and not, say, like they had animal handlers in the first place and they removed them.
But I figure God is better than Sony, you know? (Ok, ok, so that's not hard to achieve;) He's not affraid to admit that some things weren't that well balanced in the first place and had to be changed.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Try calling the California Academy of Sciences on Howard. 415-321-8000
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
No need to travel to a new place. Simply travel back in time 100 million years.
It was already known that Dinosaurs were sociable animals. They are still alive in a special place. It is called Congress.
The movie is a work of fiction. Once again, an American movie director distorts history to satisfy American audiences. This is an affront to our history-- why do we tollerate it?
The movie shows American packs. However, any history book will show that those are clearly British packs.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
The dinosaurs were running away from Noah's Flood.
Large numbers of entangled fossils are also found where the water swept them together.
The real question is, can they open doors?
And this one as well.
any history book will show that those are clearly British packs
Considering it was before the 1707 Act of Union (or whatever that treaty was that "united" England and Scotland),
they may have been English packs (probably rugby hooligans) but they were not British packs.
Well, I am American, so I've probably got redcoat history wrong too. But they weren't British packs.
Infuriate left and right
Be sure not to take them or they will hunt you down.
Even if you hide them in... lets say a camera case.
What we're imagining is a velociraptor cluster.
So you think the SF Bay Area was in exactly the same place 100 million years ago, do you? Quite apart from the motion of the earth around the sun, and the motion of the sun around the galaxy, and the motion of galaxy through space, the terranes that now comprise the Bay Area were off in at least six different parts of the world at that time. So you'll have to be a bit more specific...
Wake me up when there's fossil evidence that Jesus had a pet dinosaur.
It goes way beyond that. This proves that they were marching 6 abreast. If some were walking behind the others, the footprints would still have overlapped. The theory of caveman dinosaur cavalry formations has never had any fossil evidence ... until now!
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
Not quite in the neighborhood, but if you ever come to Europe, pop over to the Natural History Museum in Brussels. It has the largest dinosaurus collection of Europe and it just finished a renovation of 25mio . In the free-of-charge opening Weekend (last week). there were 18000 visitors (the museum is now closed again for refurbishing). There were 3 hour waiting lines: http://www.naturalsciences.be/index_html
"Jurassic Park IV was right about 'raptors' " Jurassic Park had the right ideas about "raptor" dinosaurs - they were big, they were bad, and they were Grand Chess Masters...
I love Brussels. Does this museum contain any discovered fossils of the ancestors of the Manneken Pis?
Therefore tigers, leopards, cheetahs, cougars, bobcats, servals and ocelots must all hunt in packs. And that's how we do Science on Slashdot, apparently.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I realize you were being funny, but your post made me wonder why anyone really would doubt that they were pack hunters. Wolves and other wild canines hunt in packs. A few species of big cats hunt in groups. Why wouldn't the small carnivores of sixty million years ago also hunt in packs?
No... Michael Crichton got it right. Which isn't that surprising considering his scientific background.
Yes, this is a Wikipedia entry, but it still gives out reasonably good idea of his education.
Please stop giving Spielberg credit for another mans educated guess.
Not so. Since the universe is infinite, defining a center point is arbitrary. By choosing the ground beneath my feet as the center point of the universe, going back in time will simply reverse the effect of the various velocities you see affecting my position by defining your center point elsewhere :)
It's nothing but crumpled porno and Ayn Rand.
Come on now, dinosaur tracks? Tracks in a riverbed where the river is powerful enough to wash their bones downstream. Oceans and seas came and went, mountain ranges were raised up and eroded to nothing since the time of the dinosaur, yet their tracks still exist? Of course they're a plant.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Really all this concludes is that there are multiples of these dinosaurs in the same place at the same time; not that they hunted in packs. For all we know, they might have been fighting each other, mating or coming together to die of old age or starvation. Maybe there was a shortage of food and a particularly large dinosaur wandered into the same area as they were...so they all charged the big guy down. But without using any known "pack tactics" to do so (i.e. just using their normal solitary hunting tactics).
Sorry but until the exception becomes the standard in fossil evidence, I refuse to believe it.
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
Those dinosaurs in Jurassic Park were NOT "raptors", but more closely resembled the deinonycus.
Velociraptors were smaller, and had longer, crocodile like jaws.
This has been annoying the crap out of me since Jurrasic Park first came out.
If you're in the east bay, you might want to stop by the Valley Life Sciences Building (usually abbreviated VLSB) and their Paleontology Museum on the UC Berkeley campus. They have a lot of cool stuff, although for most of it not necessarily from a child's perspective. However, what they *do* have is a full sized assembled T-Rex, which is pretty impressive to see, for curious children of all ages.
exceptio probat regulam in casibus non exceptis
> Where is the nearest place I can take my curious children
> to see full sized assembled dinosaur fossil skeletons?
Since other posters suggested as far away as Europe, I feel free to add this:
The Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, PA displays actual fossil dinosaur skeletons. Most places just display plaster or fiberglass castings, usually painted to look like the original rock. They have a very nice collection, including a T-Rex, an allosaurus, a stegosaurus, and a Diplodocus carnegii (guess why it is named that) that takes up most of the hall. Going to the (in same building) library was fun, growing up.
Well, not Jesus, but in the book of Daniel, you can read about a dragon called Bel in Babylon:
1:23 Now there was a large dragon, and the Babylonians used to revere it. 1:24 The king said to Daniel, "Surely you can't claim that this is not a living god. So worship it!" But Daniel replied, "I will worship the Lord my God alone, for he is the living God. 1:26 But, O king, if you will grant me authority I will put the dragon to death using neither sword nor staff." The king replied, "I grant you authority."
Most of the dragon stories (and most stories about other gods) were excised from the Bible by King James, but this one slipped through.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Well, even leaving conservation of momentum out of it, before you sign up for the kind of time machine that tracks the ground under your feet, you'd better calculate the odds that the ground beneath your feet today was a pool of magma 100 million years ago. :)
You would have to use calculus of variations to do this properly I think.
The way I understand the question the raptor is always running at you. So the question is what path has the longest run until the raptor hits you.
Still seems hard. Not sure how I would set it up. Didn't do a lot of CofV in my university days, and none after it.
Now, both of those species happen to fall into a larger grouping of relate fossils called the Dromaeosauridae -- and in that sense they could both be referred to as 'dromaeosaurs' (though not 'Dromaeosaurus'). But that would be a less formal and less specific way to refer to them.