Re: The absurdity, the absurdity (was: Cooperating theropods?)

["Larry Dunn" <larrydunn@hotmail.com>]

Jack <jconrad@lib.drury.edu> also wrote:

>Also,
>I know that there is a pride of lions in central or northern Africa 
which
>specializes in taking down elephants and have even taken adults which
>weigh up to 20 times as much as the average pride member (there's a 
great
>new pictoral out, I could probably get the ref.). 

Stretches the imagination doesn't it?  Must take a lot of lions piling 
on to achieve that.  (And, ahem, a lot of cooperation which requires a 
lot of intelligence.)  

So lions are getting desperate.  Probably brought on by depletion of 
saner prey choices.  Wonder what (or who!) caused such an extreme change 
in prey selection?  Do you think that elephants are the preferred prey 
species of lions?  

> Also, African hunting
>dogs take wildebeest many times their size 

But wildebeest/wild dog is not the same weight ratio as 
tenontosaur/deinonychus, and let's not forget that wild dogs are 
mammals.  I assume that even the mammalian wild dogs, enjoying life as 
they do, leave water buffalo and bigger animals alone. 

>and occasionally lose a member
>in doing so.

 No one ever claimed that pack hunting is risk-free.  How often do you 
think that the dogs lose three of their pack in one feeding event?  Why 
doesn't this tend to dissuade people from the pack-hunting rationale for 
the site?
 
> What is the likelihood that dromies moved in packs?  
>What is
>the likelihood that such a pack (or flock, or pride) could have 
sustained
>itself on only small kills?  

That's a tautology.  "If they hunted in big packs, they must have needed 
a lot of food, so they hunted large animals, which they could only have 
killed in big packs."  Oh!

>Bobcats are specialized small game hunters
>which usually hunt alone aren't they?  

Exactly.  Amazingly, most carnivorous vertebrates operate alone and eat 
things smaller than they are.  There's nothing "specialized" about that.  
Why assume dromaeosaurs were any different?

>There are numerous viable possibilities for the situation without
>resorting to making comparisons with beetles predating elephants.

I don't understand.  But of course beetles predate elephants -- by 
millions of years.   How does this bear?

>Some bacteria kill and eat humans.

The pack-microbes are at it again!  First ants, now microbes.  The 
giant-slayer dromaeosaur enthusiasts will soon be turning to sub-atomic 
particles to prove their point.

Larry

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