The Clever Badger One lab accident away from being a super villain

It Must Be a Slow News Day

A short Monday morning rant.

The MSNBC science section had an article a couple of days ago reporting on a paper by David Hone at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of China in Beijing and Oliver Rauhut at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany. 

The paper, Feeding behavior and bone utilization by theropod dinosaurs, sits behind a pay wall at the Lethaia Journal site¹

MSNBC goes on for some length about the paper's conclusions about T. rex (remember T. rex?).

T. rex

According to MSNBC, the paper concludes that T. rex largely preyed on juvenile animals and ate them whole (NB - the paper appears to focus on theropod dinosaurs in general, of which T. rex is just one example.  MSNBC locks onto T. rex presumably because it's well known).  This is based on the observation that fossilized bones bearing toothmarks are rare.   The researchers also cite the rarity of juvenile dinosaurs in the fossil record as possible evidence suggesting that they were frequently eaten. 

The thing that strikes me as odd about the article isn't so much that the researchers are claiming these things, but that MSNBC seems to be reporting them as if they are surprising or unexpected discoveries.²

They're not, and the researchers themselves say as much when they mention the possibilities that (for example) juvenile bones simply might not have been preserved well (fossilization, despite what some folks think, is a relatively rare event) or that such bones may have been entirely digested.³

It's not remarkable in the least to suggest that large, predatory animals (like T. rex) would go after young, old, or incapacitated prey.  Such behavior is extremely common among predators - it's much more efficient to eat something that's easy to catch and relatively defenseless than to chase down and kill a strong, experienced adult.  (This is why you never want to be the slowest zebra.) 

In the bigger scheme of things, the points that MSNBC reports don't reveal anything other than the fact that theropod dinosaurs apparently acted like predatory animals generally act - they ate what they could catch and probably tended to pick off the easiest prey they could find.     

I'm still interested in reading the full paper, but I can't help but wish that the mainstream media would do a better job of reporting the actual research instead of giving in to the trend of sensationalizing it.

CB

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¹Check with your local public or university library and see if they have an institutional subscription to Lethaia. Currently, my library in Louisville is drying out all of their servers following last week's flooding, so I don't yet have a copy of the article itself.

²MSNBC also makes a very lame attempt at humor with the following opening paragraph:

Although past research has suggested Tyrannosaurus rex was related to chickens, now findings hint this giant predator might have acted chicken too.

In this case, "acting chicken" apparently means "preferring easy to catch prey", in which case every predator "acts chicken". 

³MSNBC muddies the waters here.  They cite crocodiles as having strong stomach acids, and claim that crocodiles are "among the closest living relatives of dinosaurs".  That's a true but misleading statement, as (particularly with respect to the theropod dinosaurs) birds are closer.