Re: theropod scavenging

[Nick Longrich <longrich@alumni.princeton.edu>]

Title: Re: theropod scavenging

> With respect
> to the sense of smell - tell me where I'm going wrong, but I'd have to
> say I can't see what the fuss is about - theropods may or may not have
> had great senses of smell and eyesight - and elevating the
> sensory platform may or may not provided some advantage - but
> because the senses can be equally as important to a predator as a
> scavenger it really has little no baring on the
> argument.

        Very true. But we're still left with the question of why exactly the sense of smell is so good in these guys if it's not for finding carcasses. I doubt that an excellent sense of smell necessarily correlates with scavenging as Horner implies (but hasn't to my knowledge demonstrated), but the question then becomes: OK, well, what DOES a good sense of smell correlate with, if anything? Clearly, tyrannosaurids were doing something that dromaeosaurids, troodontids, and ornithomimids were not; I suspect those gargantuan olfactory bulbs didn't appear for no reason at all... I used to be sort of skeptical of the contention that the development was that spectacular in a tyrannosaurid, or figured it might be a scaling thing, but I've seen a small tyrannosaur frontal (comparable in size to Saurornitholestes, Dromaeosaurus, Troodon, and ornithomimid frontals) at the RTMP and the impression for the olfactory bulb suggests something several times as large in terms of volume as in the other theropods. So did they track prey? Use it for nocturnal attacks? (i'm sort of partial to the idea of nocturnal tyrannosaurs- hunting at night might help explain how on earth a T. rex could get within a half mile of a duckbill without getting seen).

Nick L.