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Re: Palms in

Richard Travsky said:

Bakker stated: 
 Regarding predators, he said he'd been looking for baby
 teeth for years. Age can be discerned from shed teeth.

Age can be discerned from shed teeth? Well, perhaps in mammals, where there might be a difference between the milk teeth and the adult teeth, but how would you do it for theropods? One of the big problems with classification of theropod teeth is that so many are so similar that it is difficult to identify the teeth on the level of genus or even family sometimes, let alone tell the age. How, for instance, do we know if the small shed teeth are not developing teeth in the mouth of a larger dinosaur? Or, how do we know that the little teeth are not from a little adult predator?

 He said he's such teeth. The slide(s) showed these
 such a tooth on the end of a match stick. These were
 tiny teeth. In fact, he's found 35 of them at this
 site. Basically, it's a nursery. There are remains
 of 30 different animals (species?) here. The bones
 have been nibbled on. The slides showed tiny gnaw marks.
 In fact, the bones show both tiny and large gnaw marks.
 This indicates the parents also chewed on the bones.
 It seems, just like with bullets and a gun, the gnaw
 marks are distinctive.

Again, here, it is difficult to match predator bite marks on bones with the predator. Even if you know the number and arrangement of the teeth in the mouth of, say, Allosaurus fragilis, most of the time the predator is not biting with its whole mouth -- it could bite with the front, the side, etc., leaving different gouge patterns. Or, if biting with the whole mouth, some teeth may not penetrate deep enough to make discernable marks on the bones. Regarding the little teeth marks, couldn't these also be from other little adult dinosaurs or even other reptiles?

Matt Bonnan
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