what are some methods that scientists use to learn more about dinosaurs?
Much of my enquiry looks at reconstructing the behaviour of not-avian dinosaurs: animals that accept been extinct for some 66 1000000 years and are represented just past fossils. This argument alone is often enough for people to either enquire how on Earth this is possible, or to state quite baldly that it must all be made up. As with many branches of scientific discipline, certainly at that place accept been (and occasionally still are) some pretty terrible ideas and hypotheses that have been advocated at various times for dinosaur behaviour, but in that location is a myriad of sources of information and techniques that can be brought to impact the problem.
The majority of dinosaur remains are of course bones and teeth, but these have a lot to say. Aside from very obvious things similar the teeth of carnivores tending towards being abrupt, some major anatomical adaptations are strongly linked with certain behaviours. For example, animals that tin run chop-chop and particularly those that are efficient over long distances have a short thigh, but long human foot, and so we can make some reasonable deductions well-nigh how they moved from this. Others are notwithstanding more extreme and clear cutting – those animals that dig bear witness a whole suite of adaptations to the claws, fingers, wrist, elbow, shoulder and pelvis and ofttimes too the ribs, and joints in the courage. Then when nosotros see all of these features in the tiny alvarezsaurid dinosaurs, we can exist very confident that they could dig.
We tin can even test these kinds of mechanical ideas with computer simulations. The skull of Tyrannosaurus for example has been shown to be exceptionally good at resisting the forces delivered in biting (more so than other carnivores) and this matches the actress-strong teeth they have, the increased areas for muscle attachment to evangelize that bite, and even punctures made in the bones of other dinosaurs when tyrannosaurs bit them. Bringing together multiple lines of show similar this can therefore build an exceptionally potent and coherent picture of certain behaviours.
Bite marks on basic can provide more detail than just how hard animals were bitter, merely too whole patterns of feeding. Are the teeth driven into the bone, or do they slide across the surface? Actually tyrannosaurs seem to have done both, biting hard on joints, but scraping teeth across the surface to rip meat off a relatively fresh carcass. Often it is hard to friction match marks from teeth to private species, but it is possible in some cases.
Amend all the same are stomach contents. Sometimes dinosaur specimens practise preserve with the remains of their meals inside (and the contrary is true, dinosaurs were eaten by other animals too). This is more common for carnivores where bones can survive well and from this we know that many carnivorous dinosaurs seem to have preferentially fed on pocket-sized or juvenile dinosaurs. Others ate a wide variety of other animals, and the tiny gliding Microraptor seems to accept been a generalist with various specimens having consumed a fish, a bird, and the human foot of an early on mammal. Herbivorous dinosaurs are known to have consumed various leaves, ferns and even pine cones. Continuing down the gut, we too occasionally go coprolites – fossil feces – and naturally this can give a pretty clear idea of what the animals were eating.
Moving on from feeding, we tin also reasonably infer that dinosaurs were reproducing, after all, they were around for quite a while and birds (and bees, and fifty-fifty educated fleas) are yet doing it. More than that though, we run across eggs laid in patterns in nests, equally exercise some modern birds. We also run across dinosaurs preserved brooding on those nests, protecting the eggs and perhaps sheltering and insulating them with feathers too. The dinosaur Oviraptor (the "egg thief") was and so named because it was found in association with eggs thought to vest to some other dinosaur, but afterward discoveries of embryos within these eggs, showed in fact that the parents were protecting their unborn offspring. In other dinosaur nests we run across babies considerably older than newly hatched individuals and even traces of nutrient. This implies that the adults were looking afterwards these babies long after they hatched, and that some extended parental intendance may have been involved.
This is something nosotros would predict from their living relatives. Modern birds are literally living dinosaurs, and the crocodilians are their adjacent nearest evolutionary relatives that are nevertheless alive today. Both exhibit parental care in nearly all species, looking after both the eggs and the hatchlings, in some cases for a number of years. That this is nearly universal behaviour for both, and when there is at least some evidence for this in dinosaurs, does imply that it was an ancestral trait for the collective group and thus nigh dinosaurs likely gave some intendance to their offspring pre- and post-hatching.
Other patterns of behaviour tin also exist detected from where fossils are establish. For example, specimens of ankylosaurs (those wonderfully squat and armoured dinosaurs) are regularly found in marine deposits, even well out to sea. They were terrestrial animals, but peradventure spent a lot of their fourth dimension close to the coast or effectually estuaries and rivers, meaning that they are done into the ocean more often than many others. On the flip side, the pachycephalosaurs and their giant bony heads seem to have favoured upland environments. Fossils of these animals are very rare and most of their remains are simply the "skullcaps" of solid bone, just these are rather beaten upward. This is exactly the pattern we see when bodies have been transported a long mode by rivers with skeletons being cleaved upward, small bones destroyed and only the most robust parts (here, the acme of the skull) surviving and the clear conclusion therefore is that they lived in upland areas.
Put all of these lines of evidence together – eggs, nests, anatomical specialisations, coprolites, mechanical tests, bite marks, stomach contents, preservation types – and we can really start to get to grips with these issues. Add into this other studies – such every bit from footprints and trackways, reconstructing muscle groups, assay of seasonal temperatures and climatic changes, scans of brains and basic effectually the ear to give ideas on senses, stress fractures in basic showing where acme forces were delivered, systematic injuries suggesting gainsay between horned dinosaurs – and you can see how a clear moving-picture show tin exist put together of the otherwise intangible behaviour of long extinct animals.
There are of course limitations here, and plenty is uncertain or unknown, merely this is neither incommunicable to work out nor a work of fiction, just solid researched based on a wealth of data and careful analysis.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/science/lost-worlds/2014/may/01/how-do-we-know-what-we-know-about-dinosaur-behaviour
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