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(09-02-2022, 12:40 PM)Spalea Wrote: About #243: continuation and end.
Yes, T.-rex have some mark bites everywhere on the face, it implies numerous dominance displays between them. Such "social marks" are currently watched among extant crocodilians. So, did the T.rex have lips ? Apparently no, "The searchers don't care about it" and the movies like to show the things of which they are confident, i.e. the teeth. The most T.-rex's related (birds, crocodilians...) didn't have lips, so the T.-rex neither did.
Brain and behaviour: The T.-rex's brain must have weighed 300-400 grams, it's that of a young chimpanzee (which weighs 15-25 kilos, while the t-rex 9 tons). It's very similar to the croc's one, linear even tubular. No neo-cortex, it doesn't do too much for a social behaviour, only for the basic ones: to eat, drink, hunt and mate, like the "basic birds" (thus parrots and ravens/crows are "out of competition")... It also reinforces the predatory habits rather than the scavenger' ones. But a solitary predator hunting by ambushs, not by hunting in prides. Not enough evolved for that.
1h:50mn:26sec. : photo of a T.-rex's teeth inside the hadrosaur's tail and cicatrisation "callus" mark. It proves that the edmontosaurus was alive after the T.-rex's aggression, so the T.-rex was a predator, an active predator, enoughly for that we see this behavior registered in the fossil record. It hunted relatively slow preys, essentially the triceratops and the hadrosaurs.
We are amazed by the hallucinating power of the jaws. The temporal, masseter and pterigoidus muscles have titanic clips on the skull, nothing to do with the other theropod predators like allosaurus and giganotosaurus. The T.-rex's tooth aren't serrated, they were banana shaped, 25 centimeters long with 15-20 centimeters plunged into the bone. They were grinding pistons, the more the prey was struggling, the more the jaws were tightening. Once the prey is grabed, it's over ! We can speak of a winning bite. The T.-rex could perhaps die as pierced by the triceratop's horns but if it has biten the ceratopsid before, this one is dead, screwed. So at 2h:02 mn the famous photo of the fight between T.-rex and spinosaurus in the Jurassic Park 3, as soon as the spino is grabed by the t.-rex, the fight is over, no question that the spino would be able to escape, it's a total fake.
Did the T.-rexs hunt in prides ? No, we only have some T.-rexs print marks in the same direction, it's all, it doesn't prove anything (were they printed at the same moment ?). No one theropod did hunt in prides, even the raptors (the velociraptor's skeleton found with the protoceratop's one proves just one thing: it was alone). The only one clue of a social habits we have among t.-rexs are the biting marks on the face: juveniles playing, dominance marks but it's over. The juveniles and subadults didn' t chase the preys waiting for the adults to kill them. The most realistic hunting scene we have in the movies is the T.-rex killing a gallimimus in the J.Park I. It grabs the prey and shakes it because the tooth are very embedded in the flesh. The only one factor we can refutate: the gallimimus (200-300 kilos) is a too small potential prey for the T.-rex.
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T rex is known as one of the brainiest dinos isn't it? And reptiles do exhibit parental care right? I think absence of neocortex is not a sign of low intelligence!.