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Re: Dilophosaurus Forelimb Bone Maladies
On Fri, Mar 4th, 2016 at 5:56 AM, Mike Habib <biologyinmotion@gmail.com> wrote:
> A two ton predator would have to be suicidal to take on a 20 ton animal.
That depends on what you mean by 'take on'. A direct assault on a healthy
animal is unlikely to
succeed, but a loud and ferocious bluff might be enough to panic a sauropod
into stumbling and
injuring itself, turning it's own mass against it.
A sauropod with a severely injured leg is unlikely to survive for long,
especially if it's left lying on its
side and unable to right itself, leading to the sort of complications that
large beached whales fall prey
to (breathing difficulties, internal injuries). Even a sauropod with a slight
limp may be doomed if it
can't forage effectively enough. It would require a very patient predator to
follow it around until it was
too weak to effectively fight back though.
I often wonder whether sauropods ever dared to drink water directly from rivers
or waterbodies, given
the size of some of the crocodilians about during the Mesozoic. A drinking
sauropod would seem to
present an easily killed target if it presented its head in a convenient
position to be swiftly
decapitated. Perhaps there's a reason why we find so many headless sauropod
fossils. :-)
--
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Dann Pigdon
Spatial Data Analyst Australian Dinosaurs
Melbourne, Australia
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__home.alphalink.com.au_-7Edannj&d=CwIDAw&c=clK7kQUTWtAVEOVIgvi0NU5BOUHhpN0H8p7CSfnc_gI&r=x82f3Wlkwtmbr1z8IAt9jA&m=mgTHoBaOzmpkPItIM4Va6Afo886rbLgoZebQlmt9m-g&s=bhbUaNDjuZTxl1Nv8HIoTrAQCKfMED2vHBpZu8hd56Q&e=
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