Dave Hone: uncertainty

Transcript context

…And just velociraptor you said that the, you know, the, yeah, the size, the pack hunting, all of that. The pack hunting, just to round off on that, I don’t know. Maybe there’s actually been some more recent stuff on Deinonychus looking at things like isotopes in the teeth and feeding traces and some other stuff that’s hinting that maybe there is more going on there, which is great. I’m not anti the idea that this exists, but you absolutely get this build-up of… The idea that velociraptors are a pack hunter comes from Deinonychus, and I think the evidence from Deinonychus is really weak, in exactly the way that… Okay, lions are group hunters. We know they are. Does that mean that leopards are? And tigers and puma? No. So why on Earth do you think that just because, even if Deinonychus is, that doesn’t really tell you anything about velociraptor? Group hunting has all kinds of more complicated dynamics going on than just close relatives tend to do it. You can flip that around, you know. African hunting dog, wolves, things like bush dogs. There are various canids that all hunt in groups, but then you’ve got things like maned wolves, which are effectively solitary. The hyenas. Spotted hyenas are, yeah, these super social animals, but the brown hyena, the striped hyena, and the aardwolf are solitary. So you just can’t do group versus solitary off close relatives or anything like that. I am very sure a ton of dinosaurs were aggregates, lived in groups to some degree, and I’m very sure some of them were social with complex lives and hierarchies and even pack hunting. Which ones? I have very little idea because I think the data is so sparse that we can’t really say it with any confidence for anything, in my opinion. I think that can be got at. I think we need to start getting at it with the sort of stuff I’m talking about. Like, get a better understanding of what drives sociality in lions versus tigers versus leopards. You know, relatively close relatives who overlap. Don’t forget, in India, leopards and tigers overlap with lions. The Asiatic lion is still there. So you can talk about ecosystem structure and prey size and prey type and all this stuff. We can maybe, maybe we can start piecing that together a bit better and then apply that to stuff like the track ways and the isotopes and all the rest of it. Bite marks and these mass mortality sites. So I think it can be done, but personally, like, what were pack hunters? No idea. I don’t think, I don’t think any of them were in the sense that I don’t think we’ve got good evidence for any of them. But there probably exists on earth definitive evidence one way or the other.…

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