Re: _T. rex_ debate in the newspaper

[Mickey Rowe <rowe@psych.ucsb.edu>]

It's recently been stated that Jack Horner has never seen the Denver
Museum of Natural History's tail-bitten hadrosaur.  I was pretty sure
that that was wrong, so I asked Ken Carpenter.  This is his response:

------- Start of forwarded message -------
    Date: Thu, 08 Feb 2001 12:44:24 -0700
    From: "Ken Carpenter" <KCarpenter@dmns.org>
    To: <rowe@psych.ucsb.edu>
    Subject: [MKIRKALDY@aol.com: Re: _T. rex_ debate in the newspaper]

    Mickey,

    Actually Jack has seen the specimen twice. The first time (in person)
    was the day he and I had a Amer. Assoc. Petr. Geologist sponsored
    debate on T. rex as scavenger vs. hunter (Spring of 1996?). He was
    visiting the museum in the morning before we had our debate and I
    showed it to him at that time. He first heard of the specimen when I
    gave a talk on it at Jack's 1988 symposium on behavior in the fossil
    record. I showed slides of the specimen, as well as had a brief
    description in the symposium volume. Thus, he has known about the
    evidence long before his book, The Complete T. rex. His argument that
    T. rex could not out run a hadrosaur is really not an argument. The
    use of limb ratios is somewhat bogus, because Jack, with his longer
    legs can out run me. We have the same leg ratios, but he can cover
    more ground per step. I challenged him at the debate to test this
    hypothesis in front of everyone, but he declined citing an old war
    wound (seriously!). The second time Jack saw the specimen was at the
    Denver SVP. I do know that several people did ask him about the
    specimen (which is mounted on display), but I don't remember what his
    reply was.  Ciao.  Ken

    Kenneth Carpenter, Ph.D.
    Associate Editor, Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology

------- End of forwarded message -------

-- 
Mickey Rowe     (rowe@psych.ucsb.edu)