(I later redacted a bit of it where I got a little too excited and used the word “curmudgeon” a mistake, as that could be seen as ad hominem rather than a term of endearment, and this issue is about the science and not the people, per se. Maybe it’s too extreme but I’m just fed up with this non-issue! I suspect a huge proportion of our field feels similarly, however.” M odern palaeontology is so much better than this. Maybe there is educational value in showing how science deals with provocative half-baked ideas about celebrity species, but scientists in the community need to speak up and say what the real science is about. Great galloping lizards, I am so tired of this nonsense. But somehow my cynical side leads me to suspect that this “controversy” will just persist because people want it to, regardless of logic or evidence. I hope that soon we can move on to more pressing questions about the biology of extinct animals, but the media needs to recognize that this is just hype and they are being played in a rather foolish way likewise scientists that still feel this is an exciting question need to move on. It is just something that scientists drum up now and then to get media attention. rex was “either” a predator or scavenger. There is no real substance to the controversy that T. While the discovery is nice evidence, it is not particularly exciting in a scientific sense and is only one isolated element from species that lived for hundreds of thousands of years, which to me changes nothing and allows no generalizations about the biology of any species, only the statement that at one point in time a Tyrannosaurus bit a hadrosaur that survived the encounter. rex was both a predator and scavenger it was a carnivore like virtually any other kind that has ever been known to exist. Virtually any palaeontologist who knows about the biology of extant meat-eaters and the fossil evidence of Late Cretaceous dinosaurs accepts that T. It is not like scientists sit around scratching their heads in befuddlement over the question, or debate it endlessly in scientific meetings. scavenger” so-called controversy has sadly distracted the public from vastly more important, real controversies in palaeontology since it was most strongly voiced by Dr Jack Horner in the 1990s. I may regret it, but this hits my hot buttons for One of the Worst Questions in All of Palaeobiology! Not sure if you’d want to use it but here goes. I do have a pretty strong opinion on this. Here, then, was my off-the-cuff response: My encounter with the question stemmed from an email from a science journalist (Matt Kaplan) that, as is normal practice, shared a copy of the unpublished paper and asked for comments from me to potentially use in an article he was writing for the science journal Nature’s news site. rex was a habitual predator and OMG JACK HORNER AND OTHERS BEFORE HIM WERE WRONG! If the hadrosaur survived an attack from a T. If you’re with me so far, you might be making the logical leap that this fossil find is then linked to the hotbed of furious controversy that still leaves palaeontology in crisis almost 100 years after Lambe suggested it for the tyrannosaur Gorgosaurus. It’s a broken Tyrannosaurus rex tooth embedded in a duckbill dinosaur’s tail bone, which healed after the injury, showing that the animal survived the attack. The question stems from a new discovery, reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) and thus expected to be one of the more important or exciting studies this year (no, I’m not going to get into the issue here of whether these “high impact” journals include the best scientific research or the most superficial or hyped “tabloid” science they publish both, and not in mutual exclusivity). I will explain why this is at the end of the post. Yesterday I encountered the question that, as a scientist who has studied a certain chunky Cretaceous carnivore a lot, most deflates me and makes me want to go study cancer therapeutic methods or energy sources that are alternatives to fossil fuels (but I’d be useless at either).
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