Wolves v Beavers

Beavers famously will industriously build ponds and gnaw down trees , basically until the end of time.  This is a good thing, at least until it’s too much of a good thing.

In the past, humans hunted beavers to extinction in many places.  Now they are being reintroduced, and we are discovering what happens when Beavers aren’t hunted.  They eat everything, ranging farther and farther from their dens.

This fall, researchers from Minnesota and Manitoba report a study of the wolves and beavers in Voyageurs National Park [1]. 

Wolves prey on beavers, so the reintroduction of wolves near beavers results in some beavers being eaten. 

The basic finding of the study is that, absent predators, beavers will range farther and farther, and harvesting more and more trees.  They will eat all the aspens and leave “an evergreen collar around the pond”. [2]  The researchers describe trail camera footage as “a little beaver conveyor belt”, as beavers made trip after trip up and down the trail. (Dr. Thomas Gable quoted [2]).

So…wolves.

Wolves don’t have much problem figuring out this pattern, and will start to pick off beavers for lunch.  Apparently beavers are pretty big and fierce, so this is more of a fair fight than I would have guessed.  Still, when attacked by wolves, beavers need to get back in the water, pronto.

The upshot is that wolves have the most success farther from their pond, i.e., at the far end of the beavers’ trails.  So, when there are wolves, beavers adjust, and don’t range as far, and therefore, don’t wipe out as much of the forest.

Other ecologists note that wolves also prey on moose and elk, which compete with beavers [2].  I.e., it’s not just simply wolves v beavers. So, to the degree that wolves help keep all the grazers in check, which, overall, helps the forest keep in balance.

In the case of beavers, the presence of wolves probably limits the area of their exploitation, and keeps them near their home ponds.  So, wolves as well as beavers are ecosystem engineers.

One researcher called the wolves “permitters”, who tell the beaver engineers “nope”.  So–the big bad wolf, top predator? No. Top bureaucrat is more like it. : – ( Not exactly the stereotype identity of wolves!

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1. Thomas D. Gable, Sean M. Johnson-Bice, Austin T. Homkes, John Fieberg, and Joseph K. Bump, Wolves alter the trajectory of forests by shaping the central place foraging behaviour of an ecosystem engineer. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 290 (2010)  2023. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2023.1377
2. Cara Giaimo, Leave It to Beavers? Not if You’re a Wolf, in New York Times. 2023: New York. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/07/science/beavers-wolves-forests.html

Baby Polar Dinosaurs!

One of the weird things about a warmer Earth is that polar regions will become warmer, but not really warm, and certainly not tropical.  Because the orbit and tilt of the Earth isn’t changing, just the surface temperature.  There will be long, dark winters, and it will be both cold and nasty when the sun doesn’t come up for weeks.

This is what the poles were like in dinosaur times.  More livable than now, but still not lush.

Nevertheless, dinosaurs lived in polar regions, as well as everywhere else.

This summer researchers in Alaska report not only dinosaurs, but baby dinosaurs that lived in what was arctic conditions 72 million years ago [1].  At that time, the world was overall warmer, with no permanent Northern ice.  However, winters were still cold and dark and snowy, with little to eat on land during many winter months.

It is now clear that “warm blooded” non-avian dinosaurs of many species lived in these high latitudes, though ancient crocodiles and other “cold blooded” species did not like the cold.  This opens questions about how dinosaurs lived there.   Did they live year round?  Or did they migrate south for the winter, only visiting in the summer?

The new findings include bones from hundreds of infant or new born dinosaurs from several lines of dinosaurs (it is difficult to tell the species from the fragments of infants.). Clearly, this is evidence that these animals nested and produced young at this altitude.

Assuming that nesting was during the summer months, the researchers hypothesize that the babies would still be very tiny, too small to south for the winter.  This implies that these animals lived there year round, and did not visit for a summer breeding season (as many birds do).  This is consistent with studies that suggest that fossils of adults and subadults shows that they were distinct populations from contemporaries living in the middle of North America

“Prolonged incubation would have provided negligible post-hatching time for the young (especially in larger taxa) to attain sizes necessary to undertake long migrations, likely forcing residency throughout the polar winter.”

([1], p. 6)

These findings depend to a certain extent on estimates of how fast the newborns actually grew.  But it seems likely that at least some dinosaurs lived in polar regions, including large species such as members of the Tyrannosaur family.

As the researchers note, this finding raises questions about how these animals adapted to the relatively harsh conditions of the far North.  Did they hibernate?  What did they eat?  Inevitably, they speculate that “it is plausible that insuator feathers helped to facilitate their winter polar occupation.”   ([1], p. 7)

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1. Patrick S. Druckenmiller, Gregory M. Erickson, Donald Brinkman, Caleb M. Brown, and Jaelyn J. Eberle, Nesting at extreme polar latitudes by non-avian dinosaurs. Current Biology, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2021.05.041

2. Cara Giaimo, Tiny Fossils From Alaska Reveal Dinosaur Life in the Arctic, in New York Times. 2021: New York. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/24/science/alaska-dinosurs-fossils.html

Teen Rex!

Live and learn.

Animals start small and grow up.  Some animals, most animals, live pretty similar lives as they grow up—they eat the same stuff, they live in the same ecosystem, and so on.   Young humans are pretty much little adults, ecologically. But, I learn this week, some species exhibit an “ontogenetic niche shift”, with juveniles inhabiting a different ecological niche than adults.  These animals are niche hogs, competing with more species for multiple niches.

This pattern is seen in large reptiles which are born from eggs as tiny little guys, growing larger, and ultimately growing into gigantic adults.  The big ones can, say, hunt big pray, which the smaller youngsters focus on small prey, insects and eggs.

This winter, researchers from New Mexico and Nebraska report a study of the life cycles of dinosaurs—large lizard adjacent egg layers [2].  They examine a dataset of thousands of immature, juvenile, and adults of both carnivores and herbivores.

Specifically, they plotted the body mass by the number of species of a taxon.  This represents the number and diversity of animals of different sizes.

This measure showed a bimodal distribution, with many species about 100 kg and over 1000kg, but a relative lack in between.  This pattern is largely due to the carnivores, and not seen in the herbivores.

Looking closer, the study compared this distribution for “local” groups, i.e., species that lived together and presumably shared and competed for resources.  This plot showed the bimodal distribution is due to a large number of carnivores around 100 kg.   Herbivores did not show this pattern, even though they grew as large or larger than the carnivores.

The researchers interpret this as showing that the juvenile carnivores were very diverse, exploiting many niches.  The surviving adults were less diverse, specializing in fewer niches. (It is easy to imagine mom hunding big game, while her pack of offspring swarms smaller targets.)

Herbivores did not diversify in the same way. Presumably the young and mature could find enough food without directly competing.  (For example, it is easy to visualize a baby herbivore eating low branches while mamma chomps on branches over her youngster’s head.)

Of course, there were far fewer large individuals who survived to adulthood and grew very large.  The point is that the younger, more numerous animals, competed with more and different species that the large, mature individuals.  Or, turning it around, in order to get really large, the older animals adapted to a different niche, “grown up food”, which favored getting even larger.  Small, weak adults would have to compete with swarms of hungry teenagers.

This shows, as Cara Giaimo’s headline put it, “The Outsized Influence of Teen T. Rex” [1].   Young T. rex wasn’t just a smaller T. rex, it was a gang of hunters, going after stuff that mom and dad didn’t eat.

We can certainly identify with this.  Teens seem to dominate our public culture, especially movies, games, fast food, fashion—you name it. They hunt in packs, and they hunt a wide diversity of stuff, mostly stuff that mom and dad don’t hunt.

I note that the population statistics used here are certainly worth careful scrutiny. The researchers evaluated the possibility that the differences they see are artifacts of the fossil record.  It is easy to imagine, for example, that smaller animals might not be preserved or discovered in the same frequency as larger ones.  The researchers argue that the observed pattern is far larger than could easily be explained by missing fossils.  I suspect this argument will be scrutinized in the future.

It is also interesting that this may be one answer to the question, ‘why did dinosaur get so big?’  Perhaps there was advantage to getting bigger, a lot bigger, than your offspring.  Getting at higher branches or bigger prey than junior might be a huge advantage, even with all the associated costs of extreme size.

Cool!

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1. Cara Giaimo, The Outsized Influence of Teen T. Rex and Other Young Dinosaurs, in New York Times. 2021: New York. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/25/science/tyrannosaurus-teenagers-dinosaurs.html
2. Katlin Schroeder, S. Kathleen Lyons, and Felisa A. Smith, The influence of juvenile dinosaurs on community structure and diversity. Science, 371 (6532):941, 2021. http://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6532/941.abstract

Can a Tree Live Forever?

As my late father used to say to me, “forever is a long time”.

Trees live slower lives than we do, and, barring mishap, trees can live millennia.  But how long can they actually live?  Could a tree live forever?

Most living things age and die.  Stuff wears out.  Tick-tock.

On the other hand, things like colonies or swarms (or forests) may constantly renew, replacing aging components with new ones.  In this case, the colony or whatnot is kind of “my grandfather’s ax”—every part dies and is replaced, but the meta entity continues. Indeed, really old trees are often more deadwood than live tissue.

(Some hopes for human immortality are based on a view of the human body as this kind of colonial being, made up of cells and components that, in principle, might be renewable indefinitely.)

Trees are composed of many repeating components which renew.  And trees definitely can live a long time.  But forever?

In 2019, researchers suggested that Ginkgo trees might, in fact, be able to live forever [3]!  This conclusion was based on observations that showed key aspects of the physiology did not degrade with age, opening the possibility that the tree could continue to renew itself indefinitely.

Immortality?

This summer, Sergi Munné-Bosch argues that these trees are long-lived, but they aren’t immortal [2].  For one thing, there are very few really old trees, so there is a tiny sample size.  (And no matter how far out on the statistical tail an individual might fall, “immortal” implies infinitely far out on the tail—which is a long way out!)

His main point is that senescence probably occurs even in long lived trees, but “the limited human lifespan prevents us from properly gauging it in long-lived trees in nature, in real time.” ([2], p. 3)  In fact, the Ginkgo study reported slow changes in physiology that surely must eventually lead to death.

Essentially, these trees appear “immortal” compared to us, but that doesn’t mean they can live forever.–not that we’ll ever know for sure.

Puny mortals!  You’ll never be able to tell the difference between “old” and “immortal”, because you don’t live anywhere near long enough, or slow enough!

In any case, “immortal” is not “invulnerable”—every tree can be killed.  And extremely old trees characteristically survive in very special, favorable spots.  Sadly, one of the keys to being an old tree is to be out of the easy reach of humans, who will cut down everything.  And, humans aside, no tree can live if its environment changes too much. And change is inevitable, especially if you live long enough.

So, immortality is too good to be true.  It’s too good to even be logically meaningful.   But extreme long life, 1000 years or more, is certainly possible, if difficult and rare.

But you, puny human, have only a few years.  Don’t waste them.

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1. Cara Giaimo, Can Trees Live Forever? New Kindling for an Immortal Debate, in New York Times. 2020: New York. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/27/science/trees-immortality.html
2. Sergi Munné-Bosch, Long-Lived Trees Are Not Immortal. Trends in Plant Science, 2020/07/27/ 2020. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1360138520302028
3. Li Wang, Jiawen Cui, Biao Jin, Jianguo Zhao, Huimin Xu, Zhaogeng Lu, Weixing Li, Xiaoxia Li, Linling Li, Eryuan Liang, Xiaolan Rao, Shufang Wang, Chunxiang Fu, Fuliang Cao, Richard A. Dixon, and Jinxing Lin, Multifeature analyses of vascular cambial cells reveal longevity mechanisms in old <em>Ginkgo biloba</em> trees. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117 (4):2201-2210, 2020. https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/117/4/2201.full.pdf

 

New Sparrow’s Song Is Catching On Across America

Birds are cool, and a lot more complicated than we sometimes think. Aside from the minor detail that they can fly–which you can’t, you puny human!–birds also sing.

People have studied birdsong since we had ears. How could we not?

Birds seem to learn their songs from their parents and nearby birds, with everyone in the same area quickly perfecting the same song. But some birds have regional ‘dialects’, song variants in different regions, so the song cannot be completely genetically determined.

This summer, researchers in British Colombia report on surveys of the songs of white-throated sparrows across Canada [2].  They find that West of the Rockies the sparrows adopted a new song sometime between 1960 and 2000 (we don’t have detailed data for the period), and now the song is spreading East and South.   This is an unprecedented rapid rate of change.

 

It isn’t clear why the song would change—but then again, we don’t really understand most bird songs anyway.  But the researchers show that it is probably transmitted at shared wintering areas, where birds with widely dispersed summer ranges live together down south.

In particular, they show that the song has spread to populations that share wintering grounds in the West (Texas, New Mexico, etc.), but is only just reaching populations that winter in the East (e.g., Florida).  So, somehow, and for reasons we don’t understand, birds are hearing the new thing, learning it, and taking it back home.

For whatever reason, this new song seems to be “dominant”, and continues to spread.  As Cara Giaimo wrote in the NYT, if it hasn’t arrived yet, we’ll be hearing it soon [1].

Though these birds are not common where I live—too many English sparrows?  But I’ll be on the lookout.

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1. Cara Giaimo, Canada’s Sparrows Are Singing a New Song. You’ll Hear It Soon., in New York Times. 2020: New York. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/02/science/sparrow-bird-song.html
2. Ken A. Otter, Alexandra McKenna, Stefanie E. LaZerte, and Scott M. Ramsay, Continent-wide Shifts in Song Dialects of White-Throated Sparrows. Current Biology, 2020/07/02/ 2020. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982220307715

Really Cool Bird From the Philippines

Now this is a pretty bird!

 

This month the NYT reports on dedicated bird watchers in the Philippines who have spent years patiently observing this rare and elusive South Philippine Dwarf Kingfisher (Ceyx mindanensis) [1].  They learned, among other things, that this “kingfisher” doesn’t eat fish.

They also captured some pix of these amazing pastel colored birds.  Wow!

Nice work all.

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1. Cara Giaimo, How an Eye Surgeon Got a Picture of This Rare Pastel Bird, in New York Times. 2020: New York. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/03/science/south-philippine-kingfisher-photo.html

 

More Traces Of Dinosaurs

Back when I was a young dinosaur enthusiast, we mostly had bones.  There were a few foot prints, some nests (maybe), and not much else.  Reconstruction was highly imaginative, minimally constrained by evidence.

Boy, has that changed.  There are now many traces of dinosaurs, including feathers, internal organs, droppings, and tracks.  Lots and lots of tracks.

These traces tell much more complete stories about dinosaur life and times, and what they looked like.  We know what colors they were, how they walked, who ate what.

This winter there are new reports of traces.

Researchers from South Africa report on trackways found in the midst of massive lava beds [1].  The rocks date to the end of Gondwanaland, when there was a huge volcanic event, burning and covering the land with kilometers of lava.  Not where you expect to find fossils.  This period was the extinction that preceded the final great age of dinosaurs in the Cretaceous.

The tracks were found in sandstone layers in the lava, apparently representing shallow water covering the lava for a period.  The tracks show several species, ancestors of dinosaurs and mammals lived there (or at least passed through quickly).

These tracks indicate a surprisingly diverse population, considering the devastated volcanic terrain.  The researchers dub the animals “the firewalkers”, though it isn’t clear that there was much fresh lava at the time the tracks were laid.

Researchers in Germany report another Jurassic find, a well-preserved squidlike cephalopod (classified Plesioteuthis subovata) [4]. The remains of the squid include a tooth which they identify as from a pterosaur (Rhamphorhynchus muensteri).  Chomp!

This fossil is, of course, subject to many interpretations.

However, the notion that the cephalopods swam near the surface, and that pterosaurs hunted those waters are very plausible.  So, this fossil might well indicate “a Pterosaur’s Failed Squid Meal” [3], which is also plausible.

And as in the South African tracks, dinosaurs lived among (and ate) other species.

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1. Emese M. Bordy, Akhil Rampersadh, Miengah Abrahams, Martin G. Lockley, and Howard V. Head, Tracking the Pliensbachian–Toarcian Karoo firewalkers: Trackways of quadruped and biped dinosaurs and mammaliaforms. PLOS ONE, 15 (1):e0226847, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0226847
2. Becky Ferreira, When Dinosaurs Left Tracks in a Land Consumed by Lava and Fire, in New York Times. 2020: New York. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/29/science/dinosars-tracks-firewalkers.html
3. Cara Giaimo, Fossilized Tooth Captures a Pterosaur’s Failed Squid Meal, in New York Times. 2020: New York. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/30/science/pterosaur-tooth-squid-fossil.html
4. R. Hoffmann, J. Bestwick, G. Berndt, R. Berndt, D. Fuchs, and C. Klug, Pterosaurs ate soft-bodied cephalopods (Coleoidea). Scientific Reports, 10 (1):1230, 2020/01/27 2020. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-57731-2

 

PS.  Wouldn’t “Failed Squid Meal” be a great name for a band.

Teenage T. Rexes

If there is anything more terrifying to contemplate for a puny prey animal such as myself than a Tyrannosaurus rex, it must be a teen aged T. rex!

We know that every rex must have been young once, and must have grown and grown to become the 15 ton, 5 meter terror of all things small and juicy.

How did they get so big?  T. rex was a member of an extended family, which included a bunch of related species over many centuries. How are these related to each other?  Many of these relatives are smaller than the apex critters.  It stands to reason that there would be smaller ancestors, and it certainly is reasonable that there might be smaller cousins living at the same time.  But some of theses must also be younger T. rexes, not fully grown.

It’s hard to tell from external appearances.  And paleontology is ever plagued by “splitters” who give each new specimen a new species and genus.  (I’m a long time “lumper”, seeing fewer, but more diverse, species in the fossil record.)

This winter researchers report on a study of fossil bones of one such “pygmy tyrannosaur”, which was originally classified as adults of a new species, Nanotyrannus [2].  The new study examined the bone structure, which shows the age and growth history of the animals. The detailed analysis show that these animals were probably partly grown, and likely adolescent individuals that would have been full sized T. rexes.

In addition to an estimated age (13 and 15), the bones show the growth rate over the animals’ lives.  These “growth rings” show variability from year to year, which is consistent with what is seen in contemporary species that face variable resources.  In years of abundant food, the individual grows fast, growing much slower in sparse years.  The paper notes that this observation means that care must be taken when attempting to project “average” growth rates for the whole species.

The study also implies that rexies were mid-sized even at age 15 or so, growing to full size in a late spurt.  Presumably, this late growth would happen only in favorable hunting environments.  This would suggest that locations with many large T. rexes must have had abundant prey, and other places with few or no T. rex remains might have been resource poor—though there might have been smaller rexies there, who did have as much to eat.

This study definitely calls into question the proposed “pygmy” species.  All of the putative Nanotyrannus remains seem to be immature, so there is no evidence for the stature of the full grown animals.  On the other hand, these remains could well be immature individuals from the abundant T. rex family.  If so, then there was one type of Tyrannosaur extant, in many sizes, not two co-existant branches.

I was a little surprised to read that earlier studies had reached conclusions about the age and maturity of these specimens without examining the bones, or at least without adequately examining them.  We have centuries of evidence that guessing the age from external appearance is inaccurate, so the research reported here seems like an obvious approach.  In other words, this is the final word in an argument that really should not have been happening at all.

So hooray for the lumpers!

“Together, our results support the synonomization of “Nanotyrannus” into Tyrannosaurus” ([2], )

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1. Cara Giaimo, Beware Tyrannosaurus Rex Teenagers and Their Growth Spurts, in New York Times. 2020: New York. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/03/science/tyrannosaurus-rex-teenager.html
2. Holly N. Woodward, Katie Tremaine, Scott A. Williams, Lindsay E. Zanno, John R. Horner, and Nathan Myhrvold, Growing up Tyrannosaurus rex: Osteohistology refutes the pygmy “Nanotyrannus” and supports ontogenetic niche partitioning in juvenile Tyrannosaurus. Science Advances, 6 (1):eaax6250, 2020. http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/1/eaax6250.abstract

Antler Science

The extinct Irish Elk — Megaloceros giganteus – lived more than 10,000 years ago.  Not particularly Irish, and only “school-of” Elk,  it has the distinction of the largest antlers of any species of deer, nearly 4 meters across.  This must have been an awesome animal to encounter!

The distinctive antlers raise an evolutionary puzzle. Such large, unwieldy ornaments are biologically expensive to grow and to carry around.  Presumably, they must play some advantageous role in the life of the elk, or the would have evolved away.

In contemporary deer, the antlers are both displays (“look at me!”) and as weapons.  The mega antlers of Megalocerous were certainly impressive displays.  Heck, you could probably see them from kilometers away.  It is possible that such extreme features might be selected, e.g., by sexual selection, without having any other practical value.

But, many have speculated that these antlers are so large that they could not have been used as weapons.  Even if the big guy was strong enough to maneuver these amazing hat racks, would the antlers sustain the forces that would result?

This fall, researchers in the UK and Australia report a new analysis of Megalocerous antlers, using computational models to evaluate the structural strength of various scenarios [2].  The study included antlers of contemporary large deer, along with previous investigations of the strength and stresses on the antlers.

The antlers were scanned to create three dimensional meshes representing the geometry of the bones. These were used to create a finite element model of the antlers, and various scenarios for the pose and behavior of the deer.  The mesh was also used to create a 3D printed model to help understand how the antlers probably worked in a fight.

Analysis of forces on these models suggest that the stresses of fighting depend on how the antlers engaged. Notably, Megalocerous has a prominent antler near the head, as well as the extravagant displays farther out.  Engaging the distal antlers would be very risky, as might be imagined. The leverage would stress the antler, probably dangerously so.  However, engaging the proximal antler would produce stresses similar to extant species.  So Mega might have engaged in combat, but very carefully.

“its fighting behaviour was probably more constrained and predictable than that exhibited by some extant deer.” ([2], p. 8)

The authors note that this analysis is incomplete, as it does not include any effects of neck and body muscle.  They believe that the stresses computed may overestimate the actual stress.

This is a cool computational study that is a significant improvement on earlier hypotheses based on intuition.

I’ll add the intuition that most deer do fight, so it would be surprising if Megalocerous did not. This study suggests that they might well have fought, albeit in a relatively stereotyped and careful way.

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1. Cara Giaimo, It Had the Biggest Antlers Ever Found. Were They Weapons?, in New York Times. 2019: New York. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/15/science/giant-antlers-deer.html
2. Ada J. Klinkhamer, Nicholas Woodley, James M. Neenan, William C. H. Parr, Philip Clausen, Marcelo R. Sánchez-Villagra, Gabriele Sansalone, Adrian M. Lister, and Stephen Wroe, Head to head: the case for fighting behaviour in Megaloceros giganteus using finite-element analysis. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 286 (1912):20191873, 2019. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1098/rspb.2019.1873

 

 

Dinosaur owies

This fall researchers from the UK report on a review of over 100 know fossils that indicate injuries to dinosaurs [2].  These include broken bones, tooth and claw marks, and trackways that show a limping gate or damaged foot.

The article appears in a special issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences on “Evolution of mechanisms and behaviour important for pain”.  We obviously don’t have any direct evidence about Dinosaur owies, but the article musters some of the evidence that seems relevant.

We are all familiar with famous fossil skeletons that feature evidence of healed wounds. Sue the T. rex endured multiple non-fatal injuries. The report indicates that, overall, there is something approaching 1 fracture per skeleton for larger dinosaurs.

Many fossils show healed injuries, including bite marks. Trackways show cases of animals walking with a limp. Teh researchers conclude that at least some of the individuals clearly lived quite a while and died from other causes, which they argue suggests that this indicates “protective pain behaviours”.

This inference is buttressed by other evidence that dinosaurs lived in groups, and protected their nests.  In living species, these situations see animals protecting injured members of the group, often summoned by distress calls. Indeed, living descendants of dinosaurs (crocodiles and birds) obviously feel pain, and many use distress calls and other complicated signalling, and also protect injured fellows.

In short, dinosaurs clearly did survive grievous injuries, and probably had a repertoire of protective behaviors similar to their descendants.

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This research article inspired a nice piece in the NYT, “The Veterinarian Will See Your Dinosaur Now” [1].  Cara Giaimo interviewed Ben Golas, a wildlife veterinarian, to ask, “If a banged-up dinosaur walked into a veterinarian’s office today, what might happen next?”

The injuries are grim, but vets try their best. Golas says that many of the injuries are not far from what vets face very day.  (I guess being hit by a T. rex is medically similar to being hit by a truck.)

It’s not at all clear just how you would go about treating an unhappy injured dino—you are gonna need a bigger clinic, and more than some leather gauntlets!

But if you can treat them, the treatments might include immobilizing limbs, “cage rest”, and a really big “dino-size e-collar”.  We don’t really know about dino physiology, but presumably pain killers and anti-biotics might be prescribed with care.  We are also asked to imagine a suffering T. rex that must be fed through a tube, and then have a soft diet of meat smoothies until her wounded mouth heals. How humiliating!

Once again, dinosaurs bring out the gleeful combination mundane reality and imaginative reconstruction, fantasy and science that is the wonder of dinosaurs!

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1. Cara Giaimo, The Veterinarian Will See Your Dinosaur Now, in The New York Times. 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/04/science/dinosaur-injuries-veterinarian.html
2. Les Hearn and Amanda C. de C. Williams, Pain in dinosaurs: what is the evidence? Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 374 (1785):20190370, 2019/11/11 2019. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2019.0370