Re: New paper on pachycephalosaur behavior

["Richard W. Travsky" <rtravsky@uwyo.edu>]

On Sun, 9 May 2004, Dann Pigdon wrote:
> "Richard W. Travsky" wrote:
> > 
> > Interesting. It ate parts of the skull? Not a lot of nutritional
> > material there, other than the brains, and there certainly wouldn't be
> > much of that in a dinosaur (particularly one this size).
> 
> Plenty of calcium there for those who constantly grow new teeth, or lay
> lots of hard-shelled eggs.
> 
> Perhaps pachy-domes were the cretaceous equivalent of cuttlefish bones?
> :)

Well, not so much pachys, but ingestion of bones in general. I was
thinking of hyaenas which darn near eat everything but the oink, as the
saying goes. And of course some amount of bone material will get eaten
just in the general act of feeding. But, this is also interesting, a need
for calcium sources for tooth replacement. Wonder how that measures out
metabolically...