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Recent studies indicate that large dinosaur remains may have served as significant nourishment for meat-eating predators.
Dinosaurs that consumed meat existed in environments abundant with both live and deceased sources of food.
The scientists propose that enormous animal remains, such as those of sauropod dinosaurs – known for their long necks like Diplodocus – could have served as a significant food source for big predators.
Cameron Pahl and Luis Ruedas, along with their team at Portland State University in the USA, suggest that the predators likely delayed their consumption of the carcasses until the animals perished during the dry season. They also stored fat in their tails to provide sustenance until the next dry season.
In order to experiment with the hypothesis, scientists developed a basic digital model of a dinosaur environment.
This was influenced by the prehistoric animals found in the Morrison Formation, a collection of sedimentary rocks formed in western North America during the Jurassic Period.
This consisted of significant predators such as Allosaurus, as well as massive sauropods, their remains, and an endless abundance of stegosaurs that could be hunted.
According to our model of evolution, it is possible that large theropods like Allosaurus could have adapted to survive by primarily consuming carrion from sauropods.
In their study, the authors concluded that Allosaurus and other large theropods may have adapted to primarily feeding on sauropod carcasses based on our evolutionary model.
“Despite the presence of huntable prey, scavengers were favored by selection pressure, while predators experienced decreased fitness.”
It is believed that allosaurs would wait for sauropods to die during the dry season, consume their remains, and store fat in their tails. This behavior would be repeated in the following season.
It is also logical to understand that a single sauropod carcass contained enough calories to provide sustenance for approximately 25 allosaurs for several weeks or even months. Additionally, sauropods were frequently the most prevalent dinosaurs in their surroundings.
The model included carnivores, meant to mimic allosaurs, which were given traits to enhance their hunting or scavenging skills as they obtained energy from consuming meat sources, mimicking living prey or carcasses of sauropods.
The scientists evaluated the survival success of these computer-generated meat-eating animals and determined that scavenging was a more lucrative strategy over hunting when there were abundant supplies of sauropod remains.
This implies that predators in these ecosystems may have developed specific characteristics to aid in their ability to detect and take advantage of large carcasses.
The writers emphasize that this framework is a simplified representation of a complicated system, and that the findings could be affected by the addition of more factors, such as additional types of dinosaurs or aspects of their life cycle in the simulation.
The results have been released in the publication PLoS One.
Source: independent.co.uk
