Dave Hone: prediction

Transcript context

…They’re just jogging after you. Right, but they’ve got the distance, so yeah, so it’s much more… … A hyena or wolf-like strategy than like a cheetah going for hyper-speed or a lion going for a relatively quick burst, and it either gets you or it doesn’t. And then people kind of then just go, “Well, like, but that’s ridiculous, like, they’re not even that quick,” and it’s like, yeah, but if you’re hunting something big that’s not that quick either, and so that’s a misconception. Like when I’m talking about juvenile dinosaurs, I don’t mean just out of the egg and weigh a kilo. Like a juvenile Triceratops can still weigh a ton- And be the size of a rhino. They’re not that fast, and again if you get a head start on them because, as I said, I suspect they’re nocturnal, so that’s the other thing, it’s really hard to hide a T. rex, even lions and tigers struggle to kind of hide in long grass. When you’re three and a half, four meters tall, you can’t hide. Maybe in a forest, but even then, you’re probably going to stick out and it’s going to be hard to maneuver between the trees. And we’ve got big tyrannosaurs living in what we know to have been relatively open environments. Maybe there’s some stands of trees, but it’s not like a woodland or a forest or anything like that. So they’re living in the open and surviving in the open, so they’ve got to have a way of doing this. And I think it’s either, or some combination of, being nocturnal, so it’s relatively easy to… Sneak isn’t quite the right word, but approach things to cut the distance down for your initial strike, and then just running them down. Because yeah, maybe a one-ton Triceratops or one-ton Hadrosaur is rather faster than you, but if you’ve covered the first couple of hundred meters to get up to your top speed before they start running, then you’re probably much closer to them. And then will they exhaust faster than you’ll keep going? Well, probably not 100% of the time. No predator’s that effective. But I suspect that’s what they’re doing, and it fits with what we know of their size, their vision. They’ve got a very good sense of smell. Again, that makes sense at night. It makes less sense if you’re diurnal and operating primarily in the day. And you’ve got to hide this thing, and then we know they’re pretty efficient versus relatively fast but not that efficient prey. Well, there’s a bit of a debate of scavenger versus hunter.…

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