Under A Blood Red Sky
Written by DarkSyde. With contributions from world renowned dinosaur paleontologists, Jack Horner, and Philip Currie
Sixty-five million years ago, in what would one day be aptly named Hell Creek, Montana, the blood-red Cretaceous sun breaks in blazing splendor over the rim of the eastern horizon, to illuminate a vista of bloody slaughter. In the primeval dawn's light, a pack of vicious serial killers, clothed in soft, downy, feathers, are illuminated, quietly jostling over their latest victim. The perpetrators are a supersized, deluxe model of Troodons , the intellectual giants among their kind. They are dinosaur geniuses. And their fresh kill is the corpse of a young Edmontasaurus, a type of Duckbill.
The clever raptors patiently stalked the larger herbivore through the previous afternoon and into the night, aided by their preternatural vision and large brains, after observing the adolescent hobbling to keep up with his herd. His slight limp quickly drew unwanted attention from hungry, watchful, eyes. And in this brutal land before time, it had stamped the fate of the young plant eater with the seal of violent death, from the moment the first Troodon instinctually locked in on his weakened condition.
It was only a matter of time before the cunning predators could setup their stealthy ambush under the cover of darkness. First, they went about subtlety separating the crippled youngster away from the safety of his group, with soft growls and hoots. Once the adult Troodons were between the hapless adolescent and his herd, the young Edmontasuar didn't stand a chance. It must have been a vision of horror in the waning moonlight, those large, nocturnal, orbs beaming catlike in the gloom, as they padded into position. And when they struck in the night, silently, and without mercy, it rivaled any nightmarish spectacle ever concocted by special effects wizards.
The half-grown Edmontasaur was skillfully maneuvered with nips and feints, and cornered on soft ground at the edge of a creek, bordering the broken forest. The raptors then took turns making high speed passes along his sides, stopping only to leap and spin like ballet dancers, and gracefully lash out with a single hind leg. Their switchblade rear claw, a six-inch razor-sharp scimitar, raked long the flanks of the terrified youngster with deadly precision and blinding speed. And soon the baffled plant eater felt his very entrails bulging out though dozens of lacerations. With a few more swipes, the Edmontasour was quickly brought down. Once the soft underbelly was exposed, the raptors took only seconds to close in, and begin their grisly meal. And even though he was still alive, when they began feeding, fortunately he didn't remain conscious ... for long.
Hours later the ruddy morning light painted the treetops red, then slowly crept down the trunks, turning the wide clearing a bright yellow-white. The gluttonous Troodons still feasted on their bounty. Almost three meters long when full-grown from snout to tail, these raptors were a disciplined pack with over a dozen members. And sporting the largest brain of any known dinosaur, one would imagine these sentient predators had little to worry about. But they ate quickly; gulping down huge mouthfuls of meat without swallowing. They took turns scanning the perimeter of trees warily, and sniffed the air furtively between every bloodstained morsel, reminiscent of nervous pigeons. The matriarchs among them knew it wouldn't be long before another diner came calling, and the banquet would come to a sudden end. For here there be monsters ...
All too quickly for the raptors liking, she comes plodding out of the midmorning forest, attracted by the smell of the carcass from 10 kms away. Her nearest modern relative in both phylogeny and culinary habits is a vulture. But this monster is no bird, and the earth has not seen her likeness since. She is five tons of ugly reptile with a bad attitude. A scavenging bitch with two pint-sized young in tow, and not much brighter than a turtle. She can crush a car in her jaws, the tail can slice a man in half. And while the tiny arms wave almost comically in front of her massive chest, there is nothing funny about the rows of ten-inch spikes covered in a slime of deadly bacteria, lining the inside of her cavernous maw. The Troodontids only know her as trouble ... but every child today would recognize this theropod dinosaur as the Tyrant Lizard King. She is Tyrannosaurus rex, known to generations of children as the star of movies and novels. The vicious predator who allegedly tackles Cerotopsians bristling with horned daggers, and chases down fleet footed Hadrosaurs. But some suspect she hordes a secret in her family closet, one kept hidden for eons: T. rex, may have been nothing but a lowly carrion eater ...
Or so says DR Jack Horner, Curator of Paleontology in Montana's Museum of the Rockies ... "Look, if you wanted to make a predator, you'd make a raptor" the veteran paleontologist explains. " Something that could run fast, turn on a dime, and had arms and legs with hands and feet, tipped with razor sharp claws, that could reach out and rip prey, grab prey, and bring it in. T-rex couldn't even clap it's arms together they were so tiny. About the only thing those little armlets could do ... is get crushed under tons of dinosaur if it falls down. So it couldn't take any chances with prey, because T-rex was an animal that literally could not afford to loose it's balance."
DR Horner has made some waves and drawn his share of critics by portraying the beloved leading lizard of Jurassic Park as a mere scavenger. But even though he's fighting an uphill battle, he makes an intriguing case. According to Horner, T-rex just doesn't have the typical features one would expect in active predators. For starters, Horner says the tibia is too short. Long tibias are taken to mean the animal could run fast, short ones the opposite. And T-rex's tibia is slightly shorter than his femur making him, in Horner's mind at least, more of a plodder than a runner.
And what about those ridiculous arms, what could they have been good for? The humerous was mostly submerged in the chest wall of the animal, and the ulnas and radii, about the same length as a human forearm, stuck out like brittle toothpicks. This animal had better not try any fancy maneuvering or take a chance with struggling prey, because if it looses its balance, it's going to hit very, very, hard. With that kind of delicate vestigial structure hanging out in the breeze, Horner asserts that repeated falls would lead to crushed bones, compound fractures, possibly broken ribs, and inevitable terminal infection and death. Natural selection would make quick work of that critter.
But T-rex does have some morphology one might expect to see in a scavenger. Endocasts of the animals crania, plaster molds made of the inside of it's skull where what little brain it had would be found, show an enormous olfactory region. This is the region believed responsible for the sense of smell, and the only modern equivalent to T-rex in terms of olfactory lobe to brain size in the extant animal kingdom today, is a turkey vulture. When commenting on the scene in Jurassic Park, when one of the tourists was told not to move, so as prevent T-rex's visual apparatus from picking them up, Horner commented, "T-rex may or may not have been able to see him, but the animal sure as hell would have smelled him."
In Horner's mind our lady Tyrannosaurus would casually break out of the cover of forest, and arrogantly plod straight for the brunch graciously supplied by the more agile Troodons. She would move in single-minded confidence, that nothing and no one could stop her. She would be sporting a beet red head with knurled pockmarked skin, escorted by clouds of ghastly flying insects, and coated with their parasitic clinging larvae. As she swaggered towards the pack, she would bellow low frequency 80 decibel roars that would undulate up and down in bass pitch, painfully shaking the raptors to their avian bones. And as if the sight and sound wasn't enough, with each roar would come the wafting breeze of T-rex breath, carrying a smell so intensely putrid and chock full of home-brewed foul gases, it would knock a human to his knees gagging and vomiting. The raptors would quite simply high tail it out there at warp speed, and Lady T-rex would sup at her leisure for days, without ever breaking a sweat. Why take any risks when you're the Queen Bitch of the Dinosaurs?
"Well ... That's only part of the story," says DR Philip Currie Curator of Canada's Royal Tyrrell Musuem . "Other theropod dinosaurs had ratios of tibia to femur in the same range as T-rex. Mostly the larger ones such as the Allosaurs. The predators Horner holds out as 'true predators' are mostly smaller raptors. These are bird like dinosaurs, of which velociraptor is the most famous brand-name known."
For now, DR Currie and the significant majority of the dinosaur paleontological community aren't buying the scavenger idea. They point out that large predatory dinos seem to have universally invested more in their skulls than their arms. And when you're built like a giant teeter-totter, you have to give up weight from somewhere along the chest and shoulders, if you're going to have a huge head. Otherwise the center of gravity will shift forward past the hips. T. rex, along with Giganotosaurus and others, was probably reducing the weight in it's arms, to increase the size of it's skull, especially the jaws. That's exactly what we'd expect to see in an animal that needed to bite through ribs and vertebrae of a duckbilled dinosaur, or the bony armor of Ankylosaurus. And that's what Tyrannosauroids were equipped to do. Supporting this consensus, some Cretaceous finds show partially healed bite marks in likely prey animals, which fit the dental arcade of an adult T. rex.
DR Currie continued "That's not to say that T-rex wouldn't pass up a free meal given the chance, but it was the archetypical, large, theropod predator, judging by the evidence."
It's fascinating to read through the peer reviewed literature, as well as articles written with the laymen in mind, concerning T. rex. despite its fearsome appearance, this dinosaur is almost like an old-friend. One which graced our collective childhood from earliest memory. What's interesting when perusing through the theories and criticisms, and the counter criticisms and counter theories, are the methods by which DR Currie and DR Horner pursue the elusive scientific truth. They use, data and inferences from the data to construct testable hypothesis, and then see if they can find ways to carry out that test. Even though Horner's scavenger theory upset the bedrock entire generations of paleontologists grew up with as children, the classical T. rex as the King Predator of the Dinosaurs, this debate is pursued with science, not hype and soundbites. Both scientists make their case with empirical data and plausible deductions from that body of information. For this is how the real scientific controversies are pursued.
There is another controversy making headlines in America, and this one is also allegedly an issue of science. But the methods by which one of the sides makes its 'case' in this disagreement, stand in stark contrast to the careful scientific work of Doctors Currie and Horner. This conflict threatens to shut science down in its tracks. Worse still, many adherents hope to shift the gears of discovery into reverse, and carry us back to the days when science was stifled under a blanket of extravagant claims of extremist dogma. This plot is far removed from the confines of data and testable inference. It's a contrived debate, fanned by a clever Public Relations campaign. It is a sinister return to the Dark Ages, eagerly encouraged by key politicians across America, seeking to shamelessly capitalize on ignorance and the age old religiously based hatred of knowledge. It panders to the worst human vanities and weaknesses, it appeals to the ugly ethnocentric prejudices of fundamentalist Muslims and Christians alike. In the US, almost half of the adults surveyed said they believed that humans were created in the last ten-thousand years fully formed, by Divine Fiat. More Americans can recite the name of Noah's Ark than the Hubble Space telescope. As of right now, dozens of challenges to science from fanatical fundamentalists are working through various committees, mandating the teaching of "Intelligent Design Creationism" (IDC) in one form or another. I'd like to say it's not a threat, but they're gaining ground. Now nurtured by a sympathetic political climate, this idiocy threatens to sweep the country. Part two, the conclusion, tomorrow.