London, Aug 7 (Inditop.com) Two titans fighting a bloody battle is the staple of movies like Jurassic Park. A new study of the fossils, however, indicates that theropods, the large predatory dinosaurs, were hunting much smaller prey.
Oliver Rauhut, paleontologist at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universit䴠(LMU) in Munich, and his colleague David Hone surmise that giant carnivores like T-Rex preyed mainly on juvenile dinosaurs.
“Unlike their adult and well-armed relatives, these young animals hardly posed any risk to the predators,” said Rauhut. “And their tender bones would have added important minerals to a theropod’s diet. Now we hope for more fossils to be found that add new evidence to our hypothesis.”
King of tyrants, T-Rex is by far the most famous dinosaur. Not even recent findings of slightly bigger – and maybe even more terrifying – species like Giganotosaurus could dent the aura of “T-Rex.”
But what would happen if the king turned out to be a baby killer instead of a fearless hunter of much bigger prey?
“Animals such as Tyrannosaurus are often seen as the perfect ‘killing machines’ with extremely powerful bites, which were able to bring down even the largest possible prey,” said Rauhut.
“But the very few fossils that reflect the hunt of predatory dinosaurs on large herbivores tell a tale of failure – the prey either got away, or both prey and predator were killed.”
On the other hand, the also extremely sparse cases of direct evidence for the diet of predatory dinosaurs – stomach contents and coprolites – show that juveniles or much smaller prey species were ingested and the latter were swallowed whole.
Rauhut and Hone, therefore, hypothesized that large predatory dinosaurs only as an exception attacked other large dinosaurs, but mainly fed on juveniles.
“Even modern predators prefer old and sick animals or inexperienced young individuals,” stated Hone. “These are an easy prey to bring down and the risk of injury for the predator is much lower. This strategy was probably the same in dinosaurs.”
