Re: Sue theories and the size of crocs

["Jaime Headden" <jaemei@hotmail.com>]

<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.>

What we have is twenty or so separate individuals of *T. rex*, not 
counting *T. bataar* in Asia. This, compared to the centrosaur bonebeds 
or the Cleveland-Lloyd Quarry, is insufficient data.

<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!>

Patience is a virtue. And I will stay off this particular thread unless 
there is fossil comparions that can be made. No more hyenas, cheetahs, 
lions! They are too specialized for their particular niches to be 
comparitive to extinct dinos.


Welcome back, Paul.
Jaime A. Headden

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