New Scientist
Image: Kabacchi
A few weeks ago, two UK palaeontologists announced the discovery of the world’s tiniest dinosaur. The diminutive species was just 33 to 44 centimetres in length and weighed around 200 grams – all of which the pair worked out from a single vertebra. It’s just one example of how a skilful palaeontologist can see the big picture – or in this case the little picture – from what most of us would view as the scrappiest of data.
Philip Currie at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, knows all about squeezing information out of relatively unpromising starting material. He has spent the last 15 years chipping away at an impressively bold hypothesis: that the tyrannosaurs hunted in packs rather than alone, making them even more formidable than we had thought. The hypothesis gets a thorough examination in Dino Gangs, a 2-hour documentary that airs on the Discovery Channel in the UK this Sunday. (Currie also co-wrote an accompanying book by the same name.)
This is controversial stuff, but happily the documentary makers give the sceptics a voice – several leading palaeontologists explain exactly why Currie’s idea has yet to convince many in the community. Fundamentally, they say, working out anything meaningful about how a long-dead animal behaved 70 million years ago is always going to be tricky.
But Currie isn’t daunted. Early on we’re told that the most convincing supporting evidence would come in the form of a tyrannosaur mass grave – shattering the consensus view of the beasts as solitary animals. And Currie comes up trumps: not only does he find 23 tyrannosaurs buried together in Canada, but he also explores a site in the Gobi desert where no less than 68 tyrannosaurs have been found within spitting distance of one another. Read more on newscientist.com…
