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Post by Grey on May 31, 2013 3:14:29 GMT 5
Crocs are opportunistics. The nile croc can prey on hand-sized fishes as well as zebra-sized preys. All is not related to the size, but to the level of opportunism and metabolism. Would you dare to approach a basking Deinosuchus ? No, but would it actively attack and chase me, unprovokedly? Yes, there are good chances for this, they are freakin opportunistics carnivores. Look at the size of the smallest preys nile and salties prey on. |
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Post by theropod on May 31, 2013 16:05:10 GMT 5
Well, then...
However at this size crocodilians must become less mobile due to the square-cube law, and have much higher inertia. Chasing a human would be more difficult than for a nile crocodile.
Another dangerous animal would be small Spinosaurs like Baryonyx or Irritator; we would fall perfectly within their prey-range.
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Post by Runic on May 31, 2013 19:30:37 GMT 5
Pterosaurs
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Post by creature386 on May 31, 2013 19:43:07 GMT 5
Like Hatzegopteryx, or which are you thinking of?
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Post by Runic on May 31, 2013 20:06:28 GMT 5
Any of them weighing over 200lbs
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Post by Runic on May 31, 2013 20:06:48 GMT 5
Any of them weighing over 200lbs
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Post by spinodontosaurus on May 31, 2013 20:09:02 GMT 5
I always have the impression that humans are rather bony, as in we don't have much meat on us. Whilst far from harmless, I don't think that sauropod-specialists such as Allosaurus would pay us too much attention. Ceratosaurus, on the other hand... EDIT: Large azhdarchids might consider us as food, but I think there are plenty of more dangerous predators. |
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Post by theropod on May 31, 2013 20:26:52 GMT 5
I don't think Allosaurus is that specialized. It rather seems to have been a generalist, also able to prey on something like a Stegosaurus, Camptosaurus or Dryosaurus. A human wouldn't be too different from a small ornithopod, even tough I highly doubt a really large Allosaurid would view us as food.
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Post by creature386 on May 31, 2013 20:58:04 GMT 5
Maybe we could put a decent meal for Big Al, but a 1,5 t predator is still very big.
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Post by Grey on Jun 22, 2013 1:45:24 GMT 5
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Post by creature386 on Jun 22, 2013 1:49:51 GMT 5
Did this article cite a scholary source for that claim?
Anyway, that sounds unlikely, as I don't know a predator who would attack prey which is that much smaller than itself.
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Post by theropod on Jun 22, 2013 2:53:47 GMT 5
Really sounds unlikely. Unfortunately there are many contradicting claims especially on ecology of large theropods, most are probably wrong. I cannot find a link or sufficient indications of a paper behind that article, and even less a method to back the "small-prey claim" up. Based on its functional morphology, that is not likely. An animal primarily hunting animals that small would not evolve such specializations for macrophagous diet which are even disadvantageous for snatching small animals (eg. very massive head, thick and shortish neck, massive built).
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Post by Grey on Jun 22, 2013 12:10:27 GMT 5
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3136829/This is the paper. Identifying tradeoffs between hunting and scavenging in an ecological context is important for understanding predatory guilds. In the past century, the feeding strategy of one of the largest and best-known terrestrial carnivores, Tyrannosaurus rex, has been the subject of much debate: was it an active predator or an obligate scavenger? Here we look at the feasibility of an adult T. rex being an obligate scavenger in the environmental conditions of Late Cretaceous North America, given the size distributions of sympatric herbivorous dinosaurs and likely competition with more abundant small-bodied theropods. We predict that nearly 50 per cent of herbivores would have been within a 55–85 kg range, and calculate based on expected encounter rates that carcasses from these individuals would have been quickly consumed by smaller theropods. Larger carcasses would have been very rare and heavily competed for, making them an unreliable food source. The potential carcass search rates of smaller theropods are predicted to be 14–60 times that of an adult T. rex. Our results suggest that T. rex and other extremely large carnivorous dinosaurs would have been unable to compete as obligate scavengers and would have primarily hunted large vertebrate prey, similar to many large mammalian carnivores in modern-day ecosystems.
The line of the article out of his context was misleading. The paper mainly demonstrates that T. rex was no primarily scavenger.
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Post by creature386 on Jun 22, 2013 12:36:27 GMT 5
Always these media guys.
There was a paper who has parenthetically stated that Tyrannosaurus probably preferred juvenile dinosaurs (it was the Hone and Rauhut paper) and than someone made a media article with the heading "T-rex was a coward".
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Post by Grey on Jun 22, 2013 12:39:20 GMT 5
No, this is more like me who did not read carefully to the article.
Livescience displays good articles.
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