Sue theories and the size of crocs

[pwillis@ozemail.com.au (Paul Willis)]

>Nope, you're correct on the lion thing. But ... robust forms in dinosaur
>may mean what robust forms in crocs means, which is robust, smaller
>males and gracile, larger females. But we have robust, larger (?) and
>gracile, smaller (?). Birds have bigger females, like crocs, but there
>is little in the way of robustity as opposed to gracility. When Paul
>Willis gets back, he might be able to help with this particular part.

>From what I've seen and what I remember from such morphometric work done on
crocs by characters suchs as Webb and Manolis, males crocs are both larger
and more robust than females, but not by a whole heap and not until they
are both really big anyway. But this means bugger all for dinosaurs which
could well have had the opposite relationship of size to gender or
something completely different altogether.

><Armed with this theory I predict a strongly male-biased sex ratio in T.
>rex. And sure enough, there is.>

What you have is not a theory by a hypothesis. The sample size is way too
small to indicate any sex ratio and your lines of argument for identifying
the genders are sperious and untestable. Your comparisons to various modern
analogs are almost certainly completely inappropriate, but we will never
know.

Hey folks, I'm back!

><It also explains why Sue suffered more injuries than males: fighting
>between females over the large resources of a pride of males would be
>much more serious than a squabble between closely related males over how
>many times each will mate with one female.>

(Groan) This is no substitute for a rigid argument and the argument is
usually the opposite to the one your put here (males will often fight to
the death for mating opportunities while female-female fights are usually
much less serious). As was mentioned by some other people, "Sue" may well
be male, then where does your hypothesis stand? There is some doubt that
there are injuries to Sue anyway. There is a lot of myth and specultaion
about tyrannosaurs in general and Sue in particular. Last week I was with
Chris Brochu and Sue. Chris urged a very prudent course of action: it's
going to take 2 years before Sue is removed from her jackets and matrix, so
why don't we all hold off on the speculations until we can actually see
what is and what is not there? Sounds really sensible to me! And think of
all that bandwidth we'll save!

Am I just becoming a contankerous fart as I get older or does this make
sense to others on the list as well?

Cheers,

Paul


Dr Paul M.A. Willis
Consulting Vertebrate Palaeontologist
Quinkana Pty Ltd
pwillis@ozemail.com.au