Re: Dinosaurs vs. mammals: a hypothetical scenario

[David Marjanovic <david.marjanovic@gmx.at>]

About mammals eating dinosaur eggs, two words: *Repenomamus giganticus*.

Two more: *Estesia mongoliensis*, also known as "putting the 'monster' 
in 'Gila monster'".

>  Sauropods and ankylosaurians are not going to do well in any
>  environment where trees lose their leaves for the winter *and* it's
>  cold during winter.

Of course, the Miocene was warm.

>  In the reverse, however, the "inhale and ferment" strategy of
>  sauropods and ankylosaurians might prove better at bypassing the high
>  silica content of grass than the erodible dental batteries of
>  hadrosaurs and ceratopsians.

Phytoliths are not, in fact, harder than enamel. It's not about grass, 
it's about ground-level feeding and sand in the food; sand _is_ harder 
than enamel.

>  Ornithomimids might be one of the few smaller-dinosaur clades
>  inherently fast enough to thrive in a Miocene "global savanna"
>  situation.

There was no global savanna. Roughly, today's steppes/prairies were 
savannas; today's savannas were rainforest.

>  Smaller ornithischians (most hypsiloids, pachycephalosaurs, etc) are
>  going to have a rough time. Compared to the various horses and
>  ruminants dominating the planet, they're slow during escapes
>  (quadrupeds > bipeds in speed at a given size, usually, especially
>  when we're talking cursorial vs non-cursoiral),

You might be confusing speed and endurance here.

And for both, the caudifemoralis muscle may be a lot more important than 
most people used to think.