Dave Hone: evaluation

Transcript context

…So, how can we make a decision one way or the other? So, I mean, I tend to be ultra-conservative in this context, and I think we should probably avoid saying things that we’re not quite confident about. I don’t want to ever go down the, “We must have really definitive, 100% convincing evidence,” because this is paleo and we don’t have that kind of data. But just as I talked about with things like the predator-prey size ratio stuff, there is data we can start to use on living species about what tends to trigger hunting in groups or living in groups, and what data there might be from stuff like brain sizes or other trackways. Or again, we do have bite marks indicating prey size. If you start finding repeated attacks on big prey from relatively small predators, that would be quite convincing. As you said, maybe we had bite marks of multiple different sizes. Now that on its own, it comes hard, because obviously scavenging… you know, tyrannosaurs are an exception. Most dinosaurs, most carnivorous dinosaurs have pretty similarly shaped teeth. So how easy is it to tell an adult from a juvenile from an adult from a different species that’s just a bit smaller? Probably pretty tricky. I mean, for me, I think the kind of gold standard, which I don’t think we’re ever going to find, but you never know, like, you could in theory get a trackway of something like a herbivore… with a whole bunch of carnivore tracks coming by it. We do have a couple like this, but they don’t have what I really want to see, which is if you trace the footprints of the individual carnivores, and if A’s early on, A’s footprint goes on top of B’s, but later on B’s go on top of A’s, they must have been there at the same time because there’s no way they could have been even minutes or hours apart. So if you had that, then those two must be together, or at least within sight of each other, and one’s not turning around and roaring or having a fight. If you can do that with seven or eight, all converging on one herbivore, and then everything goes manic, well, that’s really pretty convincing. It is so fascinating and awesome, like the Sherlock Holmes aspect of paleontology. Like figuring out… because you have very little signal… …And you have to figure out the puzzle of it from that. And like that’s the… it’s just you’re brilliant… You’re giving so many brilliant examples of like, yeah, if A steps on top of B and then B steps on top of A, that’s a strong signal that they were walking together.…

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