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Re: Spinosaurs ate pterosaurs


Dann Pigdon wrote:

Actually, small wild cats often do this. I've seen footage of African
servals catching birds in this manner. It's not so different to their
usual pouncing method of catching small terrestrial prey (except that
prey is caught while going up instead of when landing).


and Jaime Headden wrote:

All a serval has to
do is crouch and stalk before the prey species "bursts" from the
underbrush, expending massive amounts of calories in the effort to not
being killed, then leap out and snatch it from the air, then back to
ground. This is, relative to it's massive, very little expenditure than
the bird's.

So, as I understand it, a serval does not actually catch birds flying overhead, but ambushes them while they're on the ground, and tries to chase them down as they're taking flight?

BTW, for those who are wondering, this thread came about because of the discovery of a spinosaur tooth in the neck vertebrae of a pterosaur. Buffetaut et al. (2004) dismissed the idea that a spinosaur could catch a live pterosaur. But others (like myself) wondered if some non-flying theropod (such as an agile maniraptoran) could snatch a live pterosaur while it was on the ground, or flying close to the ground (such as during takeoff). This lead on to a discussion of whether ANY non-flying predator specializes in snatching prey out of the air, or whether this lifestyle is energetically implausible. This issue is important to hypotheses on the origin of avian flight, since predation on aerial insect prey has been suggested by many researchers as the ecological precursor to powered flight.

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