Tyrannasaurus Rex may have scavenged in later years, but I find it somewhat unconvincing that in it's early years it would have been built for much speed, just to scavenge.
While you may think the rotting 25 ton table scraps exist, I personally doubt that was a common occurance. Vultures live in mostly desert climates. There are few preditors, and little prey. They can travel large distances gliding on the wind looking for animals likely to die and then follow them. If something should die, the lack of preditors allows it to be effective at cleaning up. T. Rex lived in what would appear to be a relatively densely populated area. I really doubt he would have had time to wait for the carcass to really start rotting good so that he could find it. Many other hunters would already be at the scene, and their kills would probably be mostly consumed by the time T Rex got there.
If you look at scavengers today, they are more often small than not. The animal making the kill doesn't pick on something significantly larger than what it can eat in most cases. It's wasteful, and generally dangerous.
Lying in wait for another preditor to make a kill so it could run the preditor off would be a more likely scenerio. It would have to be a powerful preditor to kill something big enough to fill T Rex's belly, though. That would mean a formidable opponent would be standing in T Rex's way. If the preditor could kill prey that T Rex could not, why couldn't it just kill T Rex?
Some stuff in the T Rex scavenger theory has merit, but the information is very inconclusive IMHO. What remains is one of the largest carnivores to ever walk the earth. With 6" long dagger like teeth curved backwards in a manner to suggest it would hold prey, along with a 18ft tall body at 35ft+ long giving it excellent balance, heavy built in adulthood for extreme power, and lighter in adolecent years for speed.
|