SCAVENGING CHEETAHS etc

[darren.naish@port.ac.uk]

On scavenging, David wrote...

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If someone says "hunter", this automatically implies that it 
didn't refuse a free lunch, because today only cheetahs don't 
scavenge.
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As has been pointed out several times in previous 
incarnations of the 'hunter vs scavenger' debate, cheetahs do 
not automatically refuse to eat carrion. The following text 
(by me) is from ... 
http://www.cmnh.org/dinoarch/1999Mar/msg00671.html

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Brain (1981) was concerned with testing the validity of the 
osteodontokeratic culture hypothesised by Raymond Dart 
.... in studying the caching and feeding behaviours of extant 
African carnivorans, Brain observed big cats and other taxa 
in action. For the bit on cheetahs, he actually left carrion 
lying around in order to see what the cats would do with it. 
Surprise surprise, the cats did take dead antelopes, and the 
volume even includes photos of a male cheetah carrying off 
a dead antelope, and then consuming it. 
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Don't forget that captive cheetahs rarely get the chance to 
kill their own prey. They routinely eat old partial carcasses. 
Again contra certain statements in the literature, at least 
some snakes will eat carrion. Ospreys have been claimed to 
be the only raptors that don't eat carrion but again this is 
untrue. As a rule frogs and toads don't eat dead things, but 
then the biology of their vision is so different from that of 
mammals and archosaurs that they cannot be thought of as 
interpreting sensory stimuli in the same way as these other 
tetrapods.

There is a universal consensus in the dinosaur research 
community on the lifestyle of tyrannosaurs. Horner is 
deliberately going against this consensus on the basis of 
entirely spurious data. In that this viewpoint gives him an 
awful lot of publicity, it can be assumed that it is a clever 
ploy to stay in the media's attention. Indeed I know for a 
fact that when challenged, Horner's answer has on one 
occasion been "Look, this is a hypothesis". In other words, 
it's an idea that doesn't stand up in view of the evidence, but 
it's an idea nonetheless.

-- 
Darren Naish
School of Earth & Environmental Sciences
University of Portsmouth UK, PO1 3QL

email: darren.naish@port.ac.uk
tel: 023 92846045