Did you know that T.Rexes led a life of hard bumps and knocks. Virtually every Rex skeleton found had most of its ribs broken and then healed. Most T.Rex show signs of fights woth other T.Rex. WHat a t.rex could do to another t.rex though, is notheing compaired to what a t.rex can do to a hardosaur.
from ?, age ?, ?, ?, ?; October 15, 2000

I think we have to cool coolcat down. He seems to be full of hot air.
from Leonard, age 12, ?, ?, ?; October 15, 2000

Utahraptor, at 6 meters long and almost a ton, Utaraptor was the Tyrannosaurus Rex of the Raptor world. Megaraptor was bigger, but it wasn't a true raptor.
from Honkie Tong, age ?, ?, ?, ?; October 15, 2000

Err, JAMIE, this is a dinosaur page. But I have one tip on maths. PRATICE, PRATICE, PRATICE. I GOT A F9 FOR MY MATHS LAST TERM, BUT I MANAGED TO PASS THIS TIME ROUND. PRATICE, TRATICE, PRATICE. LISTEN TO AUNTIE JEAN
from Jean Danker, age 23, ?, P10 98.7Fm, ?; October 15, 2000

Dino Warz 5, its here!
from Billy Macdraw, age 18, ?, ?, ?; October 15, 2000

im in the 7 grade and i need help in science and math can u help me? please be cause i got a f in both of those subjets
from jamie c, age 12, nashport, ohio, nashport; October 15, 2000

yo,suzie i don't mean to insult you, juz trex! hey dudette i used to love trex but not any more. [check the vote place]
from coolcat, age ?, ?, ?, ?; October 15, 2000

yes, Brad i do live in Ohio! ask me any quetion or fate me, it is your chioce. check back on sunday or monday. new question, the bigest raptr was----------. it starts with a u.
from Coolcat, age ?, ?, Ohio, ?; October 15, 2000

ROAAAAAR! Who Insults me! Face Bone Crunching death. Coolcat? Coolcat? Oh! I am so sorry, are you alright? I didn't know I was standing on you!
from Suzie, age 67,543,453, Hell Creek, ?, ?; October 15, 2000

Sorry Brad. I mean the damage potential of their predatory hunting weapons when I say so.
from ?, age ?, ?, ?, ?; October 15, 2000

Do you live in Ohio? I am not very good with US geography, but I think that that is near Lake Erie...
from Brad, age 13, Woodville, ON, Canada; October 15, 2000

yes, it does start with O. listen you can answer today or tomrrow i'll be here. also if there is more than one winner i'll write your names down and do a radom draw. all the others will get their prize so don't worry about it if you don't win. this is very important info for contest. the question won't always be about me, it will be about something in the zoom area so look at more sites.
from coolcat, age 5,000,000, ?, O[oops i just gave u a hint.], ?; October 15, 2000

ahh! oh sorry! i just lost some batteries to the remote! [i know this is the second time today i've written!]as you know i am coolcat,or coolgirl if you've seen that on another site. i juz want u to know more about me. i am a girl.[duh!] i take dance classes! don't every answer my questions on any other day but friday,or saturday, otherwise I won't be there! i live in --------------- state! anyone who can answer this question will get a saturday of me answering all your SCIENCE ONLY questions! Maybe ther is a test coming up. need some hints? ask me! i will give out a hint on sundays! todays hint is it is near lake erie.oh, did you like my song all you ratr lovers? oh and all you trex lovers when you answer type questions or your fate. your fate is when i have to type i love trex 10 times! one rule for the contest don't put ?. there are to many ?s. juz make up something. bye, see you on sunday!
from Coolcat [please put on chat board!], age 5,000,000, ?, ?, ?; October 15, 2000

Yo,a place where I can finally talk about how awsome that coolcat raptr is. Yo dude he had big claws! But ya'll know that!Dude there are utahraptrs, which are on a scale of big and really big they are whoo what was that! There are many others like the man, raptr! And that loser [with a capital L!] trex don't stand a chance when he comes against a pack of raptrs! So yo trex go find your own domain, this is the raptr's! yo, yo, go back to where you came from!

Here is my song;[it's a rap]

yo,yo! whatz up!
raptr! r-a-p-t-r! r-a-p-t-r!
they had big claws and that's a fact!
yo,yo whatz up!
raptr! r-a-p-t-r! r-a-p-t-r!
they ate every thing in sight and that's a fact!
yum, yum whatz up!
raptr! r-a-p-t-r! r-a-p-t-r!
and i could go on and on!
from Coolcat, age 5,000,000, ?, ?, ?; October 15, 2000

Dinosaurs had "firepower"?
from Brad, age 13, Woodville, ON, Canada; October 14, 2000

Geeze, we don't need any dino DNA to make dinos. Just geneticly alter a flightless bird with a wishbone to lose its feathers, have scales instead, have alonger tail and arms. Ta ta a dinosaur!
from ?, age ?, ?, ?, ?; October 13, 2000

If Gigantosaurus really had to claim the throne from T.Rex, it would have to figh hard for it. T.Rex, only being four feet shorter and a ton lighter had more firepower, brains, speed and agility. It would be a bloody battle, but T.Rex would have bitten Gigantosaurus to death. T.Rex relied on carefully placed brute force to kill while Gigantosaurus relied on cutting and slashing flesh to kill. Rex was a one-bite, one kill animal while Gigantosaurus was a multiple bite killer. Morever, Gigantosaurus was slower and less agile, with alot less attitude to match. So those "new king of dinosaurs" arguments must be put to rest. Long like the King of Tyrant Dinosaurs. The only land based meat-eater T.Rex could not beat was probally Tyrannosaurus Imperator. But them again, we are not sure if that's a seperate species or just a "trophy sized" T.Rex. Enjoy.
from Leonard, age 12, ?, ?, ?; October 13, 2000

One thing odd about Gigantosaurus, is that even though it is bigger, it did not carry as much firepower as Rex why? Why did rex, being smaller, carry way more destructive firepower than Gigantosaurus? Does this mean they hunted differently? I can't see how this helps Gigantosaurus, having all the bulk but lacking all the firepower or brians to make it worthwhile. Gigantosaurus seems to be primitive compaired to T.Rex? One on one, who would win (assuming we could pit them together) Mabye size dosen't really matter in this case if you are a giant wuss.
from Timmy, age 9, ?, ?, ?; October 13, 2000

I don't think that if I was introduced to a wider viarity of dinosaurs, I would have had another dinosaur as my favourite. T.Rex was juz too good. I have also noticed most of the reasons T.Rex fans give for liking T.Rex have changed from biggest to meanest, strongest, smartest, deailest meateater.
from ?, age ?, ?, ?, ?; October 13, 2000

Not really, the Velociraptor claw is smaller than the T.Rex maximallary tooth. The biggest T.Rex tooth was the size of a Utaraptor claw.
from ?, age ?, ?, ?, ?; October 13, 2000

I'm doing a school project on dinosaurs. I'm doing it on the Jurassic period. I really need info on vegatation that time, also Land forms, Climate/weather and time period. If you could get me as much info, that'll be grate! This project is due in 1 week, please hurry!!!Thanks!!
from Monica P, age 12, Vancouver, B.C., Canada; October 13, 2000

Would you know if there are any web sites about dinosaurs and their LAND FORMS?
from Monica P, age 12, Vancouver, B.C, Canada; October 13, 2000

velociraptor have very long toe claws
from thomas v, age 11, Souix Falls, South Dakota, usa; October 13, 2000

Tinker is clearly a T-rex because of his teeth. Tinker's teeth have tall, conical, slightly recurved anterior crowns… these crowns are taller relative to diameter and more circular in cross section than any other member of the tyrannosaurid family; Tinker's lower jaws hold a single nipping tooth and 12-13 tooth sockets (per side).

Whew, that's a mouthful…it means, in short, that T-rexes have very distinctive teeth, Tinker has those same teeth…so Tinker is a Late Cretaceous T-Rex and not something else.

The fact that Tinker has the same teeth as an adult T-rex plus the fact that there is no indication of Tinker having had different `baby teeth' tells us a lot. Tinker must have eaten the same food as the adults. (There were some acid eroded and etched duckbill remains mixed in with Tinker's bones, indicating his last meal. It would have been a meal identical to what his parents would have eaten.)

As an example of what this means, today, baby crocodiles have totally different teeth than adults. The baby teeth are needle sharp for snagging insects, frogs, and other small prey. Their parents don't feed them, they look out for their own dinner. Tinker doesn't appear to be like that at all. And this is where one can speculate on T-rex social/family behavior…

Did Tinker's parents feed him? It would seem so. It is possible that Tinker could have begun to hunt for himself but he was pretty young. Mammalian predators today, at Tinkers age, don't hunt. One or both parents, prepares their food for them (I guess you could say). So were Tyrannosaurs like modern lions or leopards? We don't know, but finds like Tinker might help us answer these questions and many, many more. More importantly, Tinker will help us find new questions to ask.

We don't know how Tinker died though we hope to find out. Maybe Tinker was killed by a pack of Nanotyrannus (Nano's were probably cousins of T-rexes); many shed Nano teeth were found with Tinker's body…Nano teeth are sharper and more delicate than rex teeth. Did they kill Tinker, or just feast on a convenient food source? We'll let you know what we find, as we find it.

The simple presence of Nano teeth is interesting and is a great example of new things that Tinker will be able to tell us…When Nanotyrannus was first discovered many scientists insisted it was a young T-rex, not some midget distant cousin (Nano's were probably only half the size of a full sized rex). So much for that theory. Tinker's teeth are every bit T-rex, not at all like Nano teeth. We will be learning many more things similar to this as more of Tinker is freed and examined…and not just about Tinker.
from Kid Rex.com, age ?, ?, ?, ?; October 12, 2000

The reason we hardly hear about the social life of Tyrannosaurus, is that until recently, there has been little clue as the the social behaviour of Tyrannosaurus. It was not until recently, with the discovery of the Albertosaurus pack that clues about how Tyrannosauids behaved. The discovery of Tinker the kidrex, also provides some clue to the social behaviour of Tyrannosaurus Rex as he had the teeth of a adult Tyrannosaurus, but not the size to use them. Most reptiles who are abandoned at birth have an entirely different set of teeth, to help them hunt insects or small prey. Tinker did not have such teeth, giving rise to a theory that Tinker was taken care of. Acid etched hardosaur bones also help to support this theory. True Tinker could have scavenged a Hardosaur, but he was found near Sue and yet another T.Rex, giving clue that this could have been a family group that died during the flooding of a river.
from Levine, age 24, ?, ?, ?; October 12, 2000

New theory, the problem with Tyrannosaur(I mean the Tyrannosaur Family in general) was that they are usually found alone, which is not strange, as it took nothing short of a natural diaster to finsih an entire Tyrannosaur pock, they were that powerful. However, recently, they have found a giant heap Albertosaurus, young and old, indicating pack behaviour who all died in a flash flood. Sue the tyrannosaur was also found near Tinker and another "male" Tyrannosaur, indacating that T.Rex had at least a family group stucture. A lot of T.Rex bear many scars of battles with one another, which is the last thing you expect to find on a fossil of a solitary hunter with tens of square miles of hunting space. The Velociraptor is a suspected solitary hunter as no packs have been found. In fact, the lack of teeth near the Velociraptor vs Protoceratops fossil shows that they died alone and no other Velociraptor ate them, this points towards elociraptor being a sol! itary hunter.
from Honkie Tong, age ?, ?, ?, ?; October 12, 2000

What is the case for a tyrannosaur pack? I'm barely aware of any evidence for that at all. Why isn't it in the books?
from Brad, age 13, Woodville, ON, Canada; October 12, 2000

The case for a Tyrannosaur pack seems pretty convincing.
from Honkie Tong, age 16, ?, ?, ?; October 11, 2000

Some creationist are okay. Some are discustingly non-scientific pretending to be, some even believe that evolution happens. Like the Evolutionist camp, there are many sub divisions. However, I believe evolution did happen, but it was a far more complex process than we have thought and in some cases, it seems to be directed.
from ?, age ?, ?, ?, ?; October 11, 2000

Hey do you know that some-though-to-be T.Rex bite marks are too big to be made by T.Rex? Some suspect Tyrannosaurus Imperator really was that big after all! Though T-Imperator died out before Rex
from ?, age ?, ?, ?, ?; October 11, 2000

If they believed Tyrannosaurus was a herbivore, that's a great insult to a great predator, common, give God some credit for his genius! The Tyrannosaurus bite marks throw the herbivore theory right out of the window. How did they enen come up with such a theory in the first place?? Why do some still believe it?? They are badly deculuded in this case.
from Levine, age 24, ?, ?, ?; October 11, 2000

I guess for kids nowadays, size does not really matter, they want a balance of big and mean. Tyrannosaurus fits the bill with its size, amazing agility and incredible bite force. In short, other carnivorees are bigger but they did not have the firepower packed in Tyrannosaurus' weponary. The only monster that exceed Tyrannosaurus in sheer carnivorous firepower is that giant sea reptile in Walking with Dinosaurs. But then again, as its a sea to land compairsion, it is not really valid. Gigantosaurs and other super-allosaurs are known to make groove marks on prey bones, but only Tyrannosaurus have been known to puncture bone so dramaticly. I guess Tyrannosaurus scores the highest in the carnivore exam. A cool name also helps alot.
from Leonard, age 12, ?, ?, ?; October 11, 2000

Yeah, but I want it to be more "non-avain". Who want's a piece of Tyrannosaurus?
from Honkie Tong, age ?, ?, ?, ?; October 11, 2000

Hey Chandler, I'm Dinodex's 1200 th visitor!
from Brad, age 13, Woodville, ON, Canada; October 11, 2000

Tyrannosaurus is popular because it is one of the first dinosaurs every kid is introduced to. Most younger T-Rex voters just don't know about the wide selection of dinosaurs there are. PS: Is Saurophaganx or whatever valid, and is it bigger than T. rex?
from Brad, age 13, Woodville, ON, Canada; October 11, 2000

If we could clone Tyrannosaurus and Allosaurus, I hope they could live healthy lives and not be constantly forced to fight... I guess it depends on who the sponsor was.
from Brad, age 13, Woodville, ON, Canada; October 11, 2000

TECHNICALLY, You could buy an non-genetically modified avian from any petstore and it would still be a dinosaur anyway.
from Brad, age 13, Woodville, ON, Canada; October 11, 2000

Oh, some creationists thought that since dinosaurs supposedly coexisted with humans, (everyone knows they didn't), they had to be nice. Or something like that. They were probably watching Barney or something. I read a little creationist dinosaur book in a bookstore once, and their ignorance to real science is pretty disgusting.
from Brad, age 13, Woodville, ON, Canada; October 11, 2000

Hey, what is this "creationist" theory I here about Tyrannosaurus being herbivores?
from ?, age ?, ?, ?, ?; October 10, 2000

OK Triceratops was the biggest of the Ceratopians, the Ceratopians were a bunch of frilled, quadiped dinosaurs of relatively low intelligence. Triceratops(which means three horned face) has three horns on its head frill. Triceratops, probably the world's second most popular and well-known dinosaur, is known from far fewer skeletal specimens than its famous contemporary, Tyrannosaurus rex. Although considered a common dinosaur, its fossil record is comprised almost entirely of skulls and isolated skeletal elements. The only mounted Triceratops skeletons in the country today are composites of two or more individuals. Probably the best mounted Triceratops currently on display is at the Science Museum of Minnesota in Saint Paul. It, too, is a composite skeleton created from two individual specimens collected from two separate sites in Montana. The first and only articulated Triceratops skeleton (called Raymond) collected was discovered in western North Dakota in 1994. A resin cast of that skeleton is presently on display in Disney World's Dinoland Exhibit in Lake Buena Vista, Florida.

This most recent specimen of Triceratops horridus appears to be one of the most complete skeletons collected to date. Collected in three large blocks and 100+ smaller packages, more than 50% (by bone count) of the skeleton has already been identified. At the time of this writing, KELSEY's virutally complete skull, left lower jaw and predentary, a large number of dorsal and cervical ribs, many dorsal vertebrae, two caudal vertebrae, several cervical vertebrae, nearly all of the pelvis, both femurs and one tibia have been seen in the field or during preliminary preparation. The state of preservation of all the skeletal elements is excellent and preparation is relatively easy.

One truly spectacular element of this Triceratops discovery is the virtually complete and articulated skull. KELSEY's skull measures six and one half feet long. As a live animal, KELSEY stood about seven and one half feet high, probably grew to twenty four feet in length and weighed nearly six tons. The skeleton was preserved in a flood plain about 65 million years ago, near the close of the Cretaceous Period, the last "Age of the Dinosaurs". --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
from ?, age ?, ?, ?, ?; October 10, 2000

im derek im needing to get a report on the trysaratop for school please help me im counting on you
from derek, age 9, marshall, michigan, marshall; October 10, 2000

THis is no Jurassic Park, but I think it is possible to bring back the dinosaurs in some way. As we have the technology to graft DNA fragments to other animals, why can't we do the same for dinosaurs? Fossilisation does not totally destroy DNA strands. these could be extracted, amplified and grafted onto say, avian DNA? What we are hoping for is not a real dinosaur, but a hybrid, more avian than on-avian, but with some distinct dinosaur features...its worth a try. Want one as a pet? Technically, it could be considered a dinosaur.....
from Honkie Tong, age 16, ?, ?, ?; October 10, 2000

I guess if we could clone T.Rex and Allosaurus and pit then together, T.Rex would win 10 times otta ten?
from Leonard, age 12, ?, ?, ?; October 9, 2000

I donno, a Stego had less physical dexterity than other dinosaurs because it had such a small brain working so much body. An Allosaurus could easily steer clear of the Stego's letal arc while attacking. In fact, I don't think a Stego could hold its ground against a determined Allosaurus. The plates were made of bone and could have been used for cooling or as display to threaten predators or communicate with other stegos, but as armour, the plates would not have been very useful. I suppose to make up for its short comings, Stegosaurus stayed in a herd for protection. The plates would have made it harder to attack though, as they were made of bone.
from Honkie Tong Ka Fong Francis Ong Su Ka, age 16, Singapore, ?, ?; October 9, 2000

Oh, of course Tyrannosaurus Rex was a more advanced species of dinosauria. Tyrannosaurus had many advantages over Allosaurus. It was a more efficent eater, more intellegent and far more complex. We also suspect it was a more efficent runner, meaning it took less effort to do the same amount of work as the allosaurids. Pound for pound, Tyrannosaurus is certainly a long way ahead of Allosaurus.
from Levine, age 24, Cambridge, ?, ?; October 9, 2000

Woah, T.Rex is certainly more advanced. Bigger brainsize, greater intellegence and more efficently toothed and muscled. Of course it's more advanced. It's like compairing a F-15 Eagle (which is still good) to an F-22 Lightning (Best)
from Honkie Tong, age 16, Singapore, ?, ?; October 9, 2000

does anyone out there know of a website that will give you images of the geological features of the earth in stages as it progressed threw time.
from georgiaT, age ?, ?, ?, ?; October 9, 2000

i think that the stegasaurus plates were used primarily for cooling and warming of the body. Reason i think that? because the stegasaurus plates were rich in blood supply veins surrounded by soft tissue and skin. plates may have been used to make the animal look larger to predators. but not as a defense mechanism as some would conclude. because if they used them for defense the animal would bleed perfusely if the animal stuck out these plates to a predator. the spikes i am sure would do the deed if warranted. the stegasaurus could move its body in a way that the plates would be perpendicular to the suns rays to warm the blood that would warm the body on a cold day. just the opposite on a warm day. any thoughts on this would be appreciated.
from georgia T, age 34, ?, ga, us; October 9, 2000

what has brought you to the conclusion that t-rex was any more advanced than the allosaurus. do you think that just for the fact that allosaurus was 80 millions years before the rex in evolution that he was somehow more advanced. you must have some basis for your conclusion. what feature differences in T-rex would bring you to that conclusion.
from georgia T, age 34, ?, ga, us; October 9, 2000

Stegasaurus is really cool because it can crush things.
from Will C., age 11, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, America; October 9, 2000

Wow, Tyrannosauruses were meaner than I thought!
from Leonard, age 11, ?, OK, America; October 9, 2000

Dino Hunter Phil Currie's vision of tyrannosaurs is horrifying: Packs of monsters that stayed together to slay together

by Josh F.

"For many years we lacked any information about the behavior of tyrannosaurs and other big carnivores," says Currie, relaxing on top of one of the many ridges in the badlands of south-central Canada. (Michael Sexton) To understand why Phil Currie stands shaking on top of a ridge in a desolate Canadian wilderness, contemplating whether to drag himself to the next ridge hundreds of yards away and risk dying of dehydration or to turn back, you need to know only one scene from his childhood: He is six years old, sitting at the kitchen table. He opens a box of Rice Krispies and out plops a plastic dinosaur. Imagination shifts into high gear and the rest of little Phil's life is defined in a moment by creatures that have never been seen by humans. "I was hooked," he says. "They were real. They weren't mythology. They were the biggest, the strongest, the fastest."

So that is why he is here, in Alberta's badlands, with the temperature pushing above 105, shading his eyes against the searing sun with one hand and thrashing at blackflies with the other, studying the desolate landscape of fissured earth.

He opens a leather satchel and pulls out a photograph taken by another fossil hunter nearly 90 years earlier. He looks at the ridge, looks at the photo, looks at the ridge. "You shouldn't do it," he mutters to himself. "That's just nuts. You should go back to camp." Indeed the rest of his group, including his wife, had turned back hours ago.

"For about 15 minutes I kept talking to myself," he remembers. " 'Should I do it? Should I not do it?' I finally decided I had to try." Currie believed the ridge ahead was worth the risk because it might be the site of a nearly forgotten treasure trove of dinosaur bones. And those old fossils could bolster his theory that two-footed carnivores like Tyrannosaurus rex and Albertosaurus traveled in packs, with fleet youngsters driving prey into the powerful jaws of waiting adults.

Joined by his trusted sheltie, Seven, Currie studies an aerial photograph during a return visit to the badlands site where he unearthed ten albertosaurs of various ages. (Michael Sexton)

"Most people have thought of carnivores, especially the big ones, as solitary animals," Currie says. "The idea of ten or so tyrannosaurs coming at you at once is much more scary than thinking about just one. Not so much because of the adults but because of the juveniles. They would have been fast, nasty little animals."

Currie theorizes that lean-and-mean Albertosaurus youngsters cornered prey for their voracious but relatively slow-footed elders. (Alfred T. Kamajian)

Perhaps Currie's vision was prompted by the fact that he himself is so nimble. At 50, he still delights in planting his hiking boots at the top of a 100-foot, 60-degree sandstone slope and skiing down in a cloud of dust. And he is relentless, a hardened adventurer who always goes on to the next ridge. "Phil is driven," says Bruce Naylor, director of the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Alberta, where Currie is a staff paleontologist. Currie's wife, paleobotanist Eva Koppelhus, sums him up with one word: determined.

"I love the detective aspect of trying to understand something that isn't around anymore," he says. "And when you suffer some of these, well, hardships--sun, heat, rain, bugs, cold--you have a better appreciation for life." Particularly forms of life that vanished eons ago.

Long drawn to tyrannosaurs "because they were so dynamic and came in many varieties," Currie is perfectly located in the badlands that stretch from Alberta down through Montana and Wyoming. The area is prime ground for fossil hunters seeking tyrannosaurs, including the 40-foot-long, seven-ton T. rex and the slightly smaller Albertosaurus. The region was also once home to the sharp-clawed and birdlike Velociraptors, ostrich mimics such as Ornithomimus, and duck-billed plant eaters called hadrosaurs.

Most tyrannosaur skeletons recovered over the years from the badlands have been found in isolation, reinforcing the traditional view that they were solitary hunters or scavengers. To prove otherwise, Currie needed to find a site offering clues to interaction among tyrannosaurs, which is why he tried to find that elusive next ridge, the one paleontologist Barnum Brown had walked along back in 1910.

Brown, dubbed Mr. Bones by newspaper reporters early in the century, had discovered the first known Tyrannosaurus rex in 1902. On one of many expeditions sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History in New York, Brown followed the Red Deer River through the Alberta badlands and opened a small quarry on the side of a ridge. There he collected several bones from what he described as young tyrannosaurs and ostrich mimics. He intended to return to the quarry, but farther downstream he happened upon an area littered with so many dinosaur bones it kept him occupied for years to come. That fossil-hunting ground, now known as Dinosaur Provincial Park, is the source of many of the dinosaur skeletons in various museum collections around the world.

During a visit to the New York museum's collections in 1996, Currie rummaged through the basement in search of bones Brown had collected at the abandoned quarry. "Brown said he'd collected both juvenile tyrannosaurs and some ornithomimids," he says. "We don't have a lot of juvenile material, so I was pretty interested." Currie did not expect to be surprised. "I pulled open one tyrannosaur drawer and said, 'Hey, these aren't tyrannosaurs! They're ornithomimids.' Then I compared them with bones in another drawer and realized, 'No, these are actually baby tyrannosaurs!''' Although the two groups of animals are related, the ostrich-mimic bones are smaller, and the jaws lack teeth--a feature no tyrannosaur would be without.

More interesting, there were grown-up tyrannosaurs as well as youngsters. The mixture opened up possibilities. There was the chance, with a group of beasts, to learn about something that had been difficult for paleontologists to get a handle on: social lives. Activity, unlike bones, doesn't fossilize, but if the beasts died together, they may have lived together as well, and Currie thought he had a chance to dig up some clues about group interactions. "I just knew Brown couldn't have excavated all the remains and that there must be more," Currie says. "So I knew we had to find the site."

Unfortunately, Mr. Bones didn't leave much for Currie to go on. "Brown wasn't very good at keeping field notes, and he was exceptionally bad that year," Currie says. "He'd lost his wife to scarlet fever just before he went into the field, so he wasn't really concentrating."

Currie did have two photographs. One was of the camp. And the other was of the site itself. There were also some vague descriptions in letters Brown had sent to Henry Fairfield Osborn, his boss at the museum. "My dear Professor Osborn," Brown had scrawled on some notepaper with museum letterhead. "We are camped at last for about a week about 40 miles above Fox Coulee. . . . We have taken four good hind limbs and lots of caudal vertebrae [tailbones] and some jaw material of Albertosaurus. . . . "

By the summer of 1997, Currie and Koppelhus were ready to go. They had arranged a trip down the Red Deer with the Dinamation International Society, a nonprofit exhibition, research, and education company. The company supplied a dozen or so volunteers, rubber rafts, tents, and food. On August 1 the expedition started at a site called Content Bridge, 60 miles northwest of Drumheller. And they began to float downstream, looking at the banks.

On the fourth day, they found remnants of the campsite where Brown had moored his tent-covered barge by the riverside. Near a place called Dry Island Buffalo Jump, where a century or so ago the natives had driven buffalo off cliffs, expedition members spotted an area that looked just like the old photo. A poplar grove had grown taller, but otherwise the profile of the hills matched. Put Brown's barge next to the bank and the scene could easily have been from 1910. "It's funny," says Currie, "but even after 80 years the main ridge hills don't change that much."

The discovery raised hopes of finding the ridge with the abandoned bone bed. During their years in the badlands, Currie and Koppelhus have become adept at spotting old digs. "You look for sharp angles," Koppelhus says. "Most of the landscape is rounded by erosion. But where paleontologists have dug, there's usually a right angle cut into a hill, with a flat surface beneath it. When you see these contours, you look around for bits of plaster and burlap that would have been used to put protective jackets over the fossils. Sometimes you can even find bits of old newspapers."

By midday, however, Currie's colleagues were so drained by the heat they were ready to abandon the search. "It was our last scheduled day in the area," he says. "We went out in the morning, and everyone underestimated how much water to bring." But when the others returned to camp, Currie pushed on: "I couldn't leave, not knowing." Finally, alone, he reached the top of the distant ridge. He looked down and saw the telltale angled cuts made by shovels. At long last, he had found Mr. Bones's fossil heap. "If it wasn't for the fact that I was so close to heat exhaustion," he says, "I would have been jumping up and down."

But he still had to get back to camp with the heat and dehydration setting in. On the way, he stopped at a river and tried bending down to unlace his boots so he could go in the water. But his legs wouldn't bend. So he sat on the riverbank for a while, inching his legs closer and closer to his body until he could undo the boots. Wading in the water revived him a bit, and he slipped into camp without anyone's noticing. Quietly he changed into a swimsuit and went back to the river to immerse himself and cool his body. Then he returned to camp. The others had gathered around Koppelhus, who was rereading Brown's old letters, scouring them for location clues. "I said, 'I found it,' " Currie remembers. "And everything just broke loose."

Last spring Currie and his researchers returned to the site for a preliminary excavation, needing to answer an important question: Was this a group of tyrannosaurs from one time and place and not some random collection of bones that had been dumped there by river currents? Currie quickly came to the conclusion that the bones were 95 percent Albertosaurus. "Normally, Albertosaurus is only 5 percent of the fauna in this area," Currie says. "With 95 percent, and all in the same state of preservation, we can be pretty sure that they were together." There were ten, one more than Brown had thought, and they ranged in size from about 15 feet long for the youngsters up to about 30 feet long for the more massive adults.

The key to understanding the interaction among the tyrannosaur youngsters and their elders, Currie says, is the different proportions of the leg bones. "The legs of baby tyrannosaurs are built with ostrichlike proportions, similar to the fast ostrich-mimic dinosaurs. So they were pretty fast," he says. When an animal is young and small, it can have long legs like stilts. But, Currie says, "it gets harder as you get bigger because the stilts tend to break. You get older, and suddenly you have to worry about weight. You add all this weight and muscle, and you have to add more bone to the thighs to support it. That's what happens in adult tyrannosaurs. It happens in humans too. Our proportions change pretty dramatically from childhood to adulthood." And, of course, we slow down.

A mixed group of fast and slow carnivores may have had different roles when hunting prey such as the cattlelike hadrosaurs. "You can't help but imagine these young tyrannosaurs cutting a hadrosaur out of a herd and driving it into the jaws of the big guys," he says. That would help solve something that has long puzzled Currie as he thought about the different Alberta dinosaurs and what ate what. An adult hadrosaur is about 35 feet long, similar in size to a big Albertosaurus. "So a lone tyrannosaur probably wouldn't go after a lone hadrosaur, let alone a big herd. But hunting packs of animals would have strategies for dealing with big herds. They would try to confuse the hadrosaurs, or separate some of them out. These tyrannosaur youngsters were sleek and mean."

Currie pauses, the scene of the hunt fading from his mind. "This is just speculation, of course. There's a whole other side to packing--for raising young. There are interesting ideas that might develop out of this." His colleague Rodolfo Coria has recently discovered a bone bed of a new species of large carnivore, closely related to Giganotosaurus, in Argentina. Currie and Coria hope that comparisons between the sites might yield further insights into social interaction.

Currie also hopes to learn what killed the tyrannosaurs along the river. It's hard to imagine a catastrophe that would wipe out a bunch of strong, dominant dinosaurs all at once. There's no sign of a big flood or volcanic ash that would tell of an eruption. So Currie is going back to the site this summer, although he hopes for a much easier trip. But as someone who divides time into chunks of millions of years, he can say, "You have to take a long-term perspective: the discomfort will stop. The challenge, the mystery, is always going to be there."

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Happy Hunting Grounds

A 20-foot-long Albertosaurus towers over visitors at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Alberta, Canada. (Michael Sexton) The harsh, dry Alberta badlands in south-central Canada don't seem like the kind of place to attract hordes of dinosaurs--or any form of life besides flies and prickly pear cactus--but that's because the scenery has changed quite a bit in the past 75 million years.

"Near the end of the Cretaceous Period, this place would have looked a lot more like the Gulf Coast does today," says Bruce Naylor, director of the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Alberta. "It was lush, with lots of coastal rivers, lagoons, and an inland sea."

The wetlands attracted large tyrannosaurs such as Albertosaurus and Daspletosaurus, along with the smaller "ostrich mimic" dinosaurs and deadly sickle-clawed members of the Dromaeosaur family called Velociraptors. Running this gauntlet of carnivores were massive herds of plant-eating duck-billed hadrosaurs, many-horned ceratopsians, and tanklike, heavily armored ankylosaurs.

Conditions in the wetlands were also optimal for preserving the remains of the dead. Muddy, fine-grained riverborne sediments buried a carcass soon after the animal dropped, sealing it from the assaults of scavengers and erosion. Over time, these sediment layers hardened into sandstone and mudstone and even harder ironstone, piling on the protection. The result: A lot of entombed, intact dinosaurs, sealed and oblivious to whatever disaster befell their relatives some 65 million years ago, wiping them from the planet.

Ensuing years brought a drier, cooler Canada. Ice ages came and went. When the glaciers of the last one retreated, about 10,000 years ago, their meltwaters unleashed fast-flowing streams that cut down through Alberta's sediments like chain saws. They carved the ancient rocks into a labyrinth of steep-sided hills covered with loose rock and deep gullies branching off from central canyons.

Rains came and ground away the soft sandstone at the breakneck speed of two centimeters a year. (In the sturdy world of stone, that's like watching sugar disappear into a cup of coffee.) And with each new rainstorm, new dinosaur bones are revealed.--J. F.

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Tyrannosaur Feathers?

The recently discovered Caudipteryx, a tiny ancestral relative of tyrannosaurs, sported delicate, decorative tall feathers. (Michael Sexton) Paleontologists keep uncovering tantalizing evidence of an evolutionary link between dinosaurs, including the giant tyrannosaurs, and modern birds. Phil Currie and geologist Ji Qiang of the National Geological Museum in China, recently coauthored a scholarly report about two small dinosaurs--Caudipteryx and Protarchaeopteryx--that had what looked, for all intents and purposes, like feathers. "These two new animals are part of a group of dinosaurs called coelurosaurs," Currie says. "Velociraptor is also one of these, as are all the ostrich-mimic dinosaurs that keep getting confused with baby tyrannosaurs.The interesting thing is that tyrannosaurs are actually more closely related to these dinosaurs than they are to massive carnivores like Allosaurus."

Tyrannosaurs used to be lumped with other giants into a group called carnosaurs, Currie adds, "but recently there's been a lot of work showing that tyrannosaurs are actually just big versions of coelurosaurs." Despite their size, tyrannosaurs share a lot of birdlike features with the smaller dinos.

These tiny Chinese dinosaurs lived 50 million years or so before tyrannosaurs made the scene. So if they had feathers, and modern birds have feathers, it's quite possible that tyrannosaurs, falling on a family-tree branch somewhere in between the other two groups, had them as well. "There's a very good chance that all of these things, at least in some stage of their lives, had feathers on their bodies," Currie says.

And if tyrannosaurs ran around in packs, Currie argues, the likelihood they had feathers is even greater. "With packs you get social behavior. And with social behavior you have things like courtship or threat displays, and the use of display structures like feathers," he says. It's pretty clear that's what Caudipteryx, with a peacocklike fan spreading out from its tail, was doing; those feathers are the wrong shape and in the wrong place to have anything to do with flight.--J. F.

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Bone Puzzles

Identifying random dinosaur bones pulled from the earth is both an art and a science. Having a whole skeleton, especially a skull, makes things a lot simpler. But that's rare, since a carcass is often scattered before it fossilizes. When Barnum Brown ventured to the Alberta badlands in 1910 and discovered a mound of leg bones, vertebrae, and a few teeth--but no complete skulls--he concluded the skeletal remains were from both tyrannosaurs and ornithomimids, or ostrich mimics. Brown shipped the fossils home and never took a closer look.

Phil Currie opened the jumbled drawers of bones 86 years later and lined up all the right legs on a table. In another cabinet, he found leg bones that were known to be ostrich mimics'. A baby tyrannosaur leg is virtually identical to that of an adult ornithomimid. It's about the same size, and since the two dinosaurs were probably closely related, the angles and positions of the leg bones are also very similar. But when Currie looked more closely at the two, he realized that even though the bones Brown found were the right length to belong to ornithomimids, they were all too wide to be anything but those of young tyrannosaurs. "The babies of large animals sort of anticipate how much mass they're going to have to support when they get big," Currie explains. "A baby elephant bone may be the same length as an adult deer bone, but it will be more massive."

Then Currie noticed that the walls of one of the broken leg bones were also too thick to belong to an ostrich mimic, which has relatively thin bone walls, as birds do today. And every animal has a somewhat different pattern of muscle attachment to bones. By carefully comparing the scars from where the muscles were on Brown's finds with those on the ostrich mimics, Currie could see enough differences to assure him that he was looking at a set of fossils that were exclusively tyrannosaurs. --Fenella Saunders

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from Josh F., age ?, ?, ?, ?; October 9, 2000

New topic, why is Tyrannosaurus Rex so popular? Any takers? You can sling mud if you want.
from Honkie Tong, age 16, Singapore, Singapore, Singapore; October 8, 2000

Was Ryan talking about, ahem.....that fossilising? Well, I don't think so, but its highly probabble it that they were err, well endowed as the male has to bring his tail into contact with the female's vent. No larger species, it might be impossible to do so as there will be a gap of say, three feet? So I would say they had way to err, deal with that problem. NOW, THIS IS JUST SCIENCE. RYAN, IF YOU HAVE ANY PERVERTED REASONS FOR SENDING THAT POST, I'LL HURT YOU!
from ?, age ?, ?, ?, ?; October 8, 2000

Allosaurus id a cool dino. Personally I like T.Rex better as he was more advanced. But I think I can answer some questions, any?
from HT, age ?, ?, ?, ?; October 8, 2000

does anyone out there have any insite on the allosaurus. i know that he had 70 teeth 3 inches long and that there were 9 rows in the jaw. much like the shark. when one tooth would fall out or break out the one behind that one would push through. surrations on the teeth,much simular to shark, were very sharp. and could cut through bone somewhat effortlessly. allosaurus feces have been found that indicate that allosaurus where not selective in eating only meat from the bone but rather whole pieces of flesh. much like a pack of lions or wolves or what have you, that feed on animal flesh, if you were an allosar you had to eat what you could at the time of feasting. eat it and eat it with your guard up at all times. allosaurus is from the jurrasic period dating of around 150 million years. relative in size to the T-rex that everyone seems to be hooked on.
from georgia T, age 34, folkston, ga, us; October 8, 2000

The walling with dinosaurs book, hey I have it too. Cool book! In singapore, sales of dinosaur stuff comes and goes with every JP Movie and dino exbition at the science center. People like me have to grab as much stuff as we can before they are sold out. Do you know that dinosaur models are not avaiable in Singapore, I have been seraching all hobby stores for a quarter of the year without sucess! Grr! In fact, the only dinosaur fossil ever found in Singapore was a tooth. I guess so, most dino sites are at 5 times bigger then Singapore.
from Honkie TOng, age ?, ?, ?, ?; October 8, 2000

knock knock whos there? water water who water you doing there
from huda, age 9, toronto, ontario, canada; October 7, 2000

Huh, what did Ryan do? Hey I think T.Rex are social animals so cannibalism is not common but possible. A male T.Rex may kill any young Rex not of his offspring. Like eagles, broodmates may also have killed each other.
from Honkie Tong, age 16, ?, ?, ?; October 7, 2000

what is your favourite dinosaur??? Mine is the Homelosphale
from ch, age 11, nsw, albery, nsw; October 6, 2000

JEESH, I thought this board was moderated for content like "ryan m"'s last post...!
from Chandler, age ?, ?, ?, ?; October 6, 2000
Oops - It got by me (it's gone now). JC

Depends which dinosaur it was, Scott. Anywhere from 65 to 228 million years.
from Brad, age 13, Woodville, ON, Canada; October 6, 2000

Ryan, that part doesn't fossilize! LOL
from Brad, age 13, Woodville, ON, Canada; October 6, 2000

Yep, Mary, some dinosaurs probably ate their kids. While there is no proof that dinosaurs ate their own kids, it is accepted that they sometimes did eat kids of their own species. The most famous example of a cannibalistic dino is Coelophysis, but it was probably more widespread than just that one. Lettuce-eating rabbits supposedly eat their own young (although I've never seen that happen, seems suspiciosly like a myth to stop little kids from crushing the bunnies), so it might not have been just the carnivores. In a Walking with Dinosaurs book I have, a bunch baby T. rex eats his sibling, and then his mom. Sick.
from Brad, age 13, Woodville, ON, Canada; October 6, 2000

I think your site is cool I am going to check it out every week.
from tyler, age 7, christchruch, ?, New zealand; October 6, 2000

I know everething about dinosaurs exept how they died i wish i did byebye
from log, age ?, ?, ?, ?; October 6, 2000

i know everthing and one thing i know is that it is dinosaurs are a lot of rubish.
from ?, age ?, ?, ?, ?; October 6, 2000

dinosaurs did not exsist i am a know it all
from ?, age weirpeir, ?, ?, ?; October 6, 2000

do dinosaurs eat their kids
from Mary B, age 12, lanark, lesmahagow, scotland; October 6, 2000

how old are dinosaurs
from scott, age 12, lesmahagow, lesmahagow, britane; October 6, 2000

how many babys did dinosaurs have at a time
from kevin, age 12, lanrkshire, lesmahagow, bratain; October 6, 2000

Let me guess, is your disc drive full again?
from ht, age ?, ?, ?, ?; October 6, 2000
Did you other messages that are not posted here? If so, I'll have a talk with one of the technical people when they come in this morning (it's the middle of the night here right now). JC

Robert T. Bakker may be good, but he was extreme. Though I agree with him that Dinosauria in general were active, I find his views a tad bit too active. I may be a Rex fan but I find the idea of Rex running up to 70+kph extreme. (Though it will put all those scavenger theorys to rest!) Even better, Triceratops overtaking a Rhino. I see his point of view, but what can I say, it takes a Extremeist to change the world but a moderator to make it work. (Here's to your unsung job, JC).

Anyway, I believe Gigantosaurus had quite a different diet from Tyrannosaurus. The fact lies in their teeth. Though bone crunching teeth would be good for attacking unarmoured hardosaurs as the bite goes to the bone, causing extensive damage, they'll be less effective against attacking larger targets, like the Suropods, which were certainly around in Gigantosaur's time. Gigantosaurus' allosaur teeth were specialised at cutting out a wound, not gouging flesh like Rex. Long story short. Like Allosaurus, Gigantosaurus probally attacked Suropods. Which explained the brain size. You don't need too much brains to hunt a dumber creature. Unlike Rex, which was a hardosaur killer. Hunting hardosaurs needs more brain power. T.Rex probally hunted smaller dinosaurs where its killer bite would be very effective.
from ?, age ?, ?, ?, ?; October 5, 2000

My goodness! Polynax is a Triceratops like creature! I thought it was some kind of ankylosaur! A totally ill fitting name for such a dinosaur. I wonder why they chose it?
from ?, age ?, ?, ?, ?; October 4, 2000

After getting conservative estimates of how much bigger T-imperator was compaired to T-Rex and Gigantosaurus, I drew a picture of T-Rex, then drew another picture of a scaled up T-Imperator next to it. As the estimates range from 15 to 30 percent, I picked 20 percent. After drawing part of its head, I twas immediately clear to me that media overkill or not, T-imperator is certainly the biggest carnivore known to man.
from Honlie Tong, age 16, ?, ?, ?; October 4, 2000

i like the dino jokes they are so cool! but some of them just are a little corney! Kristin
from Kristin, age 14, i dunno!, cant tell, USA; October 4, 2000

I donno, but I certainly can't argue with the fact that some dinos were certainly very active, warm blooded or not. It's still a win win situtation for the active dinosaur theory. But despite the respiratory turbinate argument, there are still compelling reasons for the warm-blooded theory. But in the end, evertbody agrees that most dinosaurs had some advanced form of controling their body temperature, either through their size, or dark muscle like the yellow fined tuna of through some unknown system lost for ever to nature, much like their form of locomotion, the live birth reptiles, and the walking gait of the giant flying reptiles .
from Honkie Tong, age 16, ?, ?, ?; October 3, 2000

What time do the messages stop appearing on the webpage because the moderators have to go home? Where are the moderators based, what is the time diff with that of Singapore? I need to know this so I can put my posts in at your working hours for efficent transmittion. This ain't exactly the ICQ ya know.
from Honkie Tong Ka Fong Francis Ong Su Ka, age 16, ?, ?, ?; October 3, 2000
We are located in the western USA (near Seattle, Washington). I don't know the time difference between us and Singapore, but it's huge. JC

BY LEVINE The dinosaurs most of us over the age of 20 grew up with were plodding beasts with pea-size brains. In textbooks and schlocky B films, they were portrayed as little more than souped-up crocodiles, lurching lethargically about on splayed-out legs, hunched over like Quasimodo. Like the modern-day reptiles they were thought to resemble, dinosaurs were cold blooded: unable to self-regulate their body temperatures and dependent on the sun alone for warmth.

The budding paleontologists of today's kindergarten set are being raised on a very different crop of "terrible lizards." Bipedal carnivores, clever and fleet-footed, zip around children's literature in voracious packs. Ninety-foot-long sauropods gracefully rear up on their hind legs in coloring books. And the fierce velociraptors of Jurassic Park are able to fog up a window with their steamy breath--a sure-fire sign of a warm-blooded animal's ability to regulate its internal thermostat under almost any condition.

It is that last revisionist detail that has divided the paleontological world into rival camps. For some, endothermy, the scientific name for warm bloodedness, is the only way to explain the dinosaurs' evolutionary success. Without the ability to keep their bodies at optimum temperatures regardless of their surroundings, they argue, dinosaurs could never have dominated the globe for 160 million years.

Skeptics counter that ectothermy, the proper label for cold bloodedness, was the logical strategy for dinosaurs living in the Mesozoic Era's generally sweltering heat--and, this group claims, the only option that is supported by physiological, rather than circumstantial, evidence.

The revisionist view that has so captured the public imagination has long been led by Robert Bakker, a former evangelical preacher who has defended dinosaur warm bloodedness with sermonlike intensity. As a Yale undergraduate in the late 1960s, he assisted the legendary paleontologist John Ostrom in his landmark research on Deinonychus, an agile carnivore whose sleek skeleton seemed built for a life of speed more befitting a warm-blooded bird than a cold-blooded reptile. Bakker went on to become paleontology's enfant terrible, a crusader against slow-moving, dimwitted, crocodilian dinosaurs. He proposed such self-described "heretical" ideas as a 10-ton triceratops that could gallop past a charging rhino, and brontosaurs that gave birth to live, 500-pound young.

Above all, he painted a picture of dinosaurs that were every bit as endothermic as humans, who manage to keep their body temperature around 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit night and day, winter and summer. Instead of spending their days lazily basking in the sun and occasionally trudging along at a torpid pace, Bakker's dinosaurs--which he wryly termed "nature's special effects"--moved at constant speeds, their postures fully erect in the manner of birds and mammals. "Meat-eating dinosaurs related to Tyrannosaurus rex cruised at 3 to 4 miles an hour," claims Bakker, who bases his conclusion on fossilized footprints. "No turtle anywhere cruises at 3 to 4 miles an hour."

Bakker and his acolytes also point to dinosaurs' relatively fast growth as evidence of endothermy. Mammals and birds, which develop quickly compared with ectothermic reptiles, have bones characterized by microscopic channels that appear complex and crystal-like under the microscope. These elegant patterns form when growing bone meets and meshes with connective tissue, capturing blood vessels in dense, woven structures called Haversian canals. Armand de Ricqlès, a University of Paris anatomist, found that dinosaur bones exhibited those same intricate channels rather than the simpler, less dense structures common to reptiles. "We see the same well-vascularized bone in mammals but not in turtles and crocodiles," says Kevin Padian, a paleontologist at the University of California--Berkeley. "The way the bones grew, dinosaurs seem to have been active all the time." That pace of activity, argue Bakker and his cohorts, is the telltale sign of warm bloodedness.

With Bakker's charisma and de Ricqlès's bone histology work, endothermic dinosaurs quickly became the rage. Books were revised, natural-history museums scrambled to accommodate the shift, and Bakker became a dinosaur superstar, commanding speaking fees of up to $10,000.

Feed me. Although the public fell head over heels for the warm-blooded dinosaurs, many within the scientific community remain wary of Bakker's claims. Since measurements show that endotherms require up to 20 times more food than ectotherms, some question how the gigantic dinosaurs could possibly have eaten enough if they were warm blooded. "Can you imagine if a herd of brontosaurs were endothermic?" asks Frank Paladino, a physiologist at Indiana-Purdue University. "They would have eaten through North America in a couple of weeks." The problem would have been worse for endothermic carnivores, for, as James Farlow of Indiana-Purdue notes, "there's a lot less meat on the hoof than plant on the stem."

Bakker has tried to explain away this apparent shortcoming by asserting that predators were very rare and thus able to feast on ample prey. But, as Paul Sereno of the University of Chicago notes, an incomplete fossil record has made it "very, very difficult to reconstruct the number of predators and prey."

The evidence based on bone structures has come under fire, too. Tomasz Owerkowicz, a young Harvard University researcher, has asserted that the dense canals that de Ricqlès detected could have resulted from physical exertion rather than endothermy. In an ingenious experiment, Owerkowicz gave cold-blooded monitor lizards regular treadmill workouts and then compared their bones with those of nonaerobicized contemporaries. The well-exercised group showed the same kind of complex channels characteristic of mammals, birds, and de Ricqlès's dinosaurs, suggesting that Haversian canals are causally linked to an active lifestyle rather than warm bloodedness. South African histologist Anusuya Chinsamy has also countered some of the bone structure argument, contending that dinosaur bones exhibit bands called lines of arrested growth. These are characteristic of modern-day ectotherms, whose growth rate speeds up and slows down according to seasonal temperature fluctuations. Chinsamy concl! uded that dinosaurs grew at a more reptilian pace than envisioned by the Bakkerites.

Rather than just playing spoilsport, the ectothermic side has sought to boost its case with hard physiological evidence. John Ruben, a physiologist at Oregon State University, believes he may have found the answer in turbinates, tiny whisps of bone or cartilage deep inside the nasal cavities of mammals and birds. These structures make warm bloodedness possible by limiting water loss. When warm, moist air is exhaled, the water condenses on the turbinates; the next breath brings water vapor back into the lungs. "If [endotherms] didn't have respiratory turbinates, there is no way they could lose that much water" and survive, says Terry Jones, one of Ruben's assistants. Turbinates have never been found in living ectotherms--nor in dinosaurs.

Bet on the croc. Although Ruben's team believes they finally have the proof to cool down dinosaurs for good, they deny that they're trying to drag the animals back into lethargy. "Cold blooded doesn't necessarily mean slow and sluggish," says Jones. The Komodo dragon, the world's largest living lizard, hunts deer. "And deer are pretty active," he says. Paladino agrees: "Ectotherms can do some pretty amazing things," he says. "If I put you on a beach with a 15-foot crocodile and you try to get away, I'll put my 10 bucks on the crocodile."

Many on the cold-blooded side now use the term "gigantothermy" to describe the unique energetics of large dinosaurs. Being huge is one way to maintain a relatively constant body temperature despite cold bloodedness: Large things--which have a lot of bulk in relation to their skin area--lose heat to the outside world much more slowly than do small things. Had they been endothermic, argues James Spotila, a biologist at Drexel University, the large dinosaurs would have experienced a "meltdown," as they would be unable to dissipate internally generated heat at a fast enough rate. However, if they were indeed cold blooded, the slow heat loss associated with gigantothermy would allow them to stay relatively warm--and thus avoid a reptilian torpor--when confronted by the night or an overcast day.

In the generally tropical climate of the Mesozoic, ectothermy may have given dinosaurs an edge over warm-blooded mammals, which had to spend a great deal of energy thermoregulating themselves. Since ectotherms require so much less energy than do birds and mammals, "it's a very, very nice way to make a living if you're in an equitable climate," says Ruben. Contrary to the popular belief that warm bloodedness is always the superior strategy, ectothermy might have been key to the dinosaurs' long reign. Saying that endothermy is superior, says Peter Dodson, a paleontologist at the University of Pennsylvania, is just evolutionary "chauvinism."

The warm-blooded camp, however, is unconvinced by the new set of evidence. Bakker says that Ruben's turbinate research doesn't take into account the possibility that dinosaurs could have utilized an alternative, as-yet-unknown structure to limit water loss. "Ruben's argument is like an expert on piston-driven airplanes looking at a jet and saying you don't have a propeller," he says. Berkeley's Padian, who notes that "behavior precedes hardware in evolution," says dinosaurs may have managed warm bloodedness using mechanisms far different from those found in contemporary animals. Bakker believes that chambers found in Tyrannosaurus skulls may have acted as water-loss regulators in place of nasal turbinates.

Bakker also points to fossils that have been found in Alaska and Australia--two of the very few Mesozoic locales where the mercury occasionally dipped below freezing--as chinks in the seemingly ironclad case for ectothermy. "You don't have Komodo dragons in Seattle, walking into Starbucks," he says. Adverse weather would have particularly affected the smallest of dinosaurs--some of which ranged down to chicken size--who couldn't limit their heat loss through gigantothermy. Cold-blooded advocates have contended that hibernation or migration would have been viable alternatives, but those explanations remain in the realm of conjecture.

Unless time machines or Jurassic Park's DNA cloning technique miraculously become realities, the controversy can never be definitively resolved. "I would never say we know for sure, because we can't," admits Ruben. But although the debate will probably never end, there is little doubt as to which side has more ominous implications for our own species: If dinosaurs were indeed endothermic, then their sudden disappearance 65 million years ago may bode ill for a human race that seems to consider itself invincible. "Maybe we have to rethink our nonvulnerability to global change," explains William Showers, a geochemist at North Carolina State University. "We can't take comfort in being warm blooded if the dinosaurs were warm blooded, too."
from LEVINE, age 24, ?, ?, ?; October 3, 2000

Cool! Check out the Song for a Tyrannosaur in the Favourites section, its quite good.
from ?, age ?, ?, ?, ?; October 2, 2000

I like dinosaurs a lot. I have found a hole wall of littel dinosaur fossils. I hope we will find a way to bring them back to life.
from Kelby E., age 8, Farmington, New Mexico, U.S.A.; October 2, 2000

How to get your post out: A guide by Honkie Tong of Singapore, South East Asia

As noted, I have noticed some people complaining about failed messages. This due mainly to the fact that the messages here are moderated. If a person sends out a message like:

T.Rex is a $#%$%ing idi@t, all T.Rex fans should eat $%^^%$^!

In the unlikey event this message is allowed to passed, out kind moderator JC will make the message look like this:

T.Rex is a #############, all T.Rex fans should ##########

Get it? Now, most of the posts sent here are posted onto the board. In fact, I haven't seen a single post of mine that has failed to turn up. If you have not sent the offensive message, and your post has failed to turn up, it could be because of.......

.The messages are released at intervals, refresh your page. This is no MIRC chat! .The hard disk is full, thus no messages get through. .You local server has a problem getting through. (Though my messages travel 12000 kilometers without problem due to our goverment's superefficent internet system.) .The webstite has too many visitors, its crashing! .You have missed your question and answer. .People are ignoring your message. .Your modem is a piece of junk, and should be thrown out of the window right now, no pun intended.

These are how you solve your problems. .Try again .Refresh your page .Get a new computer .Emmigrate to other countries or areas with a good ISP.

If your messages are appearing, and nobody is answering, it could because of....

.Your topic is boring
.Nobody really paid much attention to your message
.The question has been asked countless times before....sigh.

What to do.
Simple, a long message with a lot of bold letters will do the trick, here's an example:

I like to read alot and special about Dinosaurs. My first question is:was there such thing called winged dinosaurs? My second Question is:why was it alway told in some books that dinosaurs having wings? doesn't wings make them fly?

Here's how you do it.

I really really really LIKE DINOSAURS! HEY! I have a question! IS THERE SUCH A THING CALLED A WINGED DINOSAUR?!!! WHY DO SOME BOOKS SAY DINOS HAVE WINGS?! Do WINGS HELP THEM TO FLY? I DON'T GET IT, PLEASE ANBSWER ME! AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

Or you could post a message that will invoke a large response like:

I believe that Tyrannosaurus was a scavenger. Many of you will not agree with me, but look at the points, one by one. One: Tyrannosaurus had such thick teeth that they would have had little other use than to crunch bone and scavenge carrion (rotting meat). They would have medium difficulty going into live, tense, flesh. Two: It wouldn't be able to run after prey that could run faster than 30 km an hour. For example, Triceratops could run faster than a rhinoceros, and the ostrich dinos would operate at blinding speeds compared to it. I would post more but I have to eat dinner. I'll be back later.

Be be warned, you could get messages like......

In force tests, Tyrannosaurus could bite up to forces to 12000 newtons in a killing bite. Your point that T-Rex would have had trouble penetrating tense, life flesh due to its thick teeth seems contray to the findings of the experts. In fact, a lot of your points about T-Rex are actually big misconceptions or either conceptions of your fantasy. Long story short, thick teeth do not cause feeding pronlems at 12 kilonewtons of force. T-Rex's teeth were shaped like sabers, which passed easily through flesh one the intial penetration had been made by the tooth tip. Agian, your points seem contray about all we know about T-Rex. You are badly decluded.

I hope that has helped you in your quest in the Dino Talk section....moderators, please, please let this through!
from Honkie Tong, age ?, ?, ?, ?; October 2, 2000

Sorry mano. Tyler. No dinosaur could fly. Those were not known as dinosaurs. Check it out. Yes. Some dinosaurs might have had wings instead of arms. Avimimus for example, is suspected to have tiny winglets instead. Like the ostrich, wings do not mean flight. Those non-avian dinosaurs could not fly. No dinosaur could. A dinsaur is an animal that is almost exclusively land-based, is a reptile, and walks with its legs tucked under its body (an improved stance), unlike lizards, which walke with their limbs splayed out.
from Honkie TOng, age 16, ?, ?, ?; October 2, 2000

Take a look around. I happen to have the entire collection of the slightly backdated DINOSAURS magazine. I have seen about 10-20 pictures of that dinosaur
from Honkie Tong, age ?, ?, ?, ?; October 2, 2000

Sorry Tina, I sinin't see your son's response. Could you try asking again? Sometimes when there is a fierce debate going on, any messages will get lost in the wirlwind of posts arriving. Keep trying. Brad you ready?
from Honkie Tong, age 16, ?, ?, ?; October 2, 2000
I think it was the questions about winged dinosaurs. JC

is there any one there to answer my questions I have already sent out and my son tyler c has sent out qestions too.Please response?
from tina c, age 28, maplewood, minnesota, USA; October 2, 2000
Your last note was posted almost an hour ago. Your computer (or ISP) is probably caching the old version of the page. You can try to reload the page is this happens to you again. JC

MY son loves to read books about dinosaurs and he also sent in a message in and has not received a response WHY?
from Tina C, age 28, MapleWood, Minnesota, USA; October 2, 2000
This section is moderated (since it's a kid's site and we have to screen all messages to make sure the content is appropriate); messages are not automatically uploaded, so the posting sometimes take a while to go online. As to answers, that's up to other participants in the section - other kids, some of whom are extremely knowledgeable. We have a Question and Answer section in which we answer questions (but again, they are not answered immediately, and only a fraction of the hundreds of questions we get each day can be answered). JC

I like dinosaurs because they're big and strong so they can lift things up! Also some don't eat people. I think the dinosaurs are all gone because they all went away so they won't eat people.
from Grace, age 3, ------------, -----------, U.S.A; October 2, 2000

I like to read alot and special about Dinosaurs. My first question is:was there such thing called winged dinosaurs? My second Question is:why was it alway told in some books that dinosaurs having wings? doesn't wings make them fly?
from tyler c, age 8, maplewood, minnesota, usa; October 2, 2000

I like to read all the time about dinosaur's and all the information on them. my question is: Was there any winged dinosaurs? my second question is:I seen a dinosaur picture that showed it having wings but they say there is no dinosaurs with wings why is that?
from ?, age 8, maplewood, minnesota, usa; October 2, 2000

Yep, Dale Russell suggested that "the animal ['raptor] fed probably on carrion left behind on tyrannosaur kills." I guess we know who's side he's on. Your question on Tenontosaurus is interesting. I don't know of any modern illustrations of Tenontosaurus, which ones are you referring to? Tenontosaurus, being an ornithopod, should have ossified tendons along the back and tail, holding it up. I thought there was Tenontosaurus tracks? Maybe not. The feet of Tenontosaurus are eerily convergent with those of Plateosaurus.
from Brad, age 13, Woodville, ON, Canada; October 2, 2000

Thanks for the article on T. rex species, Honkie Tong! There is even more names than I thought there would be!
from Brad, age 13, Woodville, ON, Canada; October 2, 2000

What did the Mesozoic dinosaurs really eat?

This question has spawned numerous hypotheses from scientists, dinosaur enthusiasts, and fantasy writers. Speculations about dinosaur diets are frequently based on indirect evidence that includes surveys of available food and theories about foraging abilities inferred from functional morphology. Such analyses are important tools that have suggested generalized dinosaur feeding strategies. Even so, indirect evidence cannot tell us which available foods were actually eaten. Did dinosaurs feast on certain ferns? Conifers? Mammals? Each other? We will never completely understand dinosaur food habits, but scrutiny of the fossil record has revealed a number of fortuitous traces of dinosaur feeding activities. These clues are usually rare and often controversial, but they provide us with paleobiological information which can help us better understand dinosaurs and their interactions with other organisms.

from Fossil Assemblages That Indicate Predator/ Prey Interactions Predator/prey interactions can occasionally be inferred from the associations of different organisms in exceptional fossil assemblages. One spectacular find from the Gobi Desert revealed the skeleton of a carnivorous Velociraptor entangled with a herbivorous Protoceratops (Fig. 26.1; Kielan-Jaworowska and Barsbold 1972). The relative positions of the two dinosaurs suggest that they were engaged in a struggle when they died, with the theropod's clawed feet extending into the Protoceratops's throat and belly. Although this association has often been cited as an example of fighting dinosaurs, one report disputes that view and suggests that the Velociraptor was simply feeding on a dead or dying animal (Osmólska 1993). This scenario portrays the Velociraptor as a scavenger that died of unknown causes while feeding. A more recent investigation (Unwin et al. 1995), however, argues that the taphonomic evidence supports the original predator/prey fight interpretation. Particularly tell! ing is the fact that the theropod's arm is firmly locked in the herbivore's jaws -- a position that could not have occurred accidentally. This study suggests that the struggling dinosaurs died simultaneously in a massive sandstorm. The two different interpretations of the event recorded by this remarkable Upper Cretacaeous Mongolian assemblage differ in their characterization of Velociraptor as a scavenger or as an active hunter. Both explanations, however, conclude that the Velociraptor fully intended to dine on the Protoceratops.

Other predator/prey relationships are suggested by associations of theropod teeth with bones from other animals. Dinosaur teeth were continually shed as new ones grew in, so we should expect to find them in feeding areas where vigorous biting accelerated tooth loss. One such probable theropod feeding site is indicated by the discovery of several theropod teeth with a partially articulated sauropod skeleton in the Upper Jurassic of Thailand (Buffetaut and Suteethorn 1989).

Even more compelling evidence for carnivory was found in the Lower Cretaceous of Montana, where fifteen different sites were found to have Deinonychus teeth associated with Tenontosaurus bones (Maxwell and Ostrom 1995). The frequent co-occurrence of these elements and the dearth of Deinonychus teeth in the vicinity of bones from other possible prey animals suggest that the herbivorous Tenontosaurus may have been the preferred prey of Deinonychus. At one particularly distinctive locality (Fig. 26.2), more than thirty-five Deinonychus teeth and skeletal elements from four Deinonychus individuals were found with the partial remains of one Tenontosaurus. The bones were found in fine overbank deposits and could not have been transported by fluvial processes. Thus the assemblage has been interpreted as the scavenged remains of a struggle between a large Tenontosaurus and a pack of the much smaller Deinonychus. The presence of both Deinonychus and Tenontosaurus bones at the site sugg! ests that the prey animal and members of the attacking Deinonychus pack were killed during the struggle and were subsequently consumed (Ostrom 1990; Maxwell and Ostrom 1995).

These skeletal associations tell us much about interactions between different dinosaurs because both predator and prey organisms have been identied. Fossil assemblages suggesting clear examples of predatory behavior are rare, however, and must be carefully scrutinized so that inadvertent associations of fossil bones are not misinterpreted. from Tooth Marks on Bone: The Result of Fighting or Feeding Behavior If theropods dined on other dinosaurs, we might expect to find numerous bite marks on dinosaur bones. While a number of researchers have reported tooth-damaged dinosaur bone (e.g., Jacobsen 1995), the incidence of such traces appears to be considerably lower than that of marks found on bones from communities with large mammalian carnivores (Fiorillo 1991). This discrepancy may reflect differences in carcass utilization patterns (Hunt 1987; Fiorillo 1991) or taphonomic biases (Erickson and Olson 1996). Tooth-damaged dinosaur bone can be recognized by distinctive markings such as grooves or punctures. Although some damage may have been inflicted during intraspecific dominance fights (Tanke and Currie 1995), most bite marks probably indicate carnivory. Identification of damaged bone can tell us that a particular species of dinosaur was eaten, but it generally does not indicate whether the prey was hunted and killed or opportunistically scavenged. In some cases, however, it may be possible to associate different tooth marks with specific predator activities based on the types and distribution of damage. Multiple bite marks on the ends of sauropod limb bones, for example, are more likely to represent feeding traces than assault wounds (Hunt et al. 1994b).

The identity of the animal responsible for bite marks is usually difficult to determine because many Mesozoic vertebrates (including crocodiles) were capable of causing generalized tooth damage to bone. Fortunately, well-preserved tooth marks can occasionally exhibit distinctive shapes, spacing, and/or serration marks that allow comparisons with fossil jaws of contemporaneous carnivores. For example, the spacing of the teeth in an Allosaurus jaw was found to match the patterns of scoring found on bones of an Apatosaurus (Matthew 1908). A more definitive identification was made by using dental putty to make molds of puncture marks found in bone from the Hell Creek Formation of Montana. This clever technique revealed that marks in a Triceratops pelvis and an Edmontosaurus phalanx had been inflicted by Tyrannosaurus teeth (Fig. 26.3; Erickson and Olson 1996).

Even more dramatic are the very rare examples of dinosaur teeth actually stuck in the bones of their prey. In Montana, a tyrannosaurid tooth was found embedded in a Hypacrosaurus fibula (J. R. Horner, personal communication), providing more indisputable evidence of carnivory.
from Levine, age 24, ?, ?, ?; October 2, 2000

3 most intresting facts about T-Rex.

T rex had up to 50 teeth in its mouth. I am not able to give you the 3 most interesting facts. There are too many things I like about T rex and it is not that simple to boil them down to 3 facts.

Here are some I find interesting:

T. rex was a far sleeker carnivore than previous thought, perhaps weighing less than 6.5 tons, no more than a bull elephant
T. rex's principal habitat was forest, not swamp or plain.
T. rex may have been warm blooded, and may be that its body temperature cooled as it matured.
T. rex's arms were shorter than previously thought, but even more powerful.
There appear to have been two forms of T. rex, perhaps male and female with the female being larger and more robust. Here is some other info on T. rex:
TYRANNOSAURUS
(Tyrant reptile)
FAMILY: Tyrannosauridae.
ERA: Late Cretaceous (Campanian - Maastrichtian 83.5 - 65 Ma).
SIZE: 12-14 m (39 - 46 ft).
LOCATION: North America, Asia.
FOSSILS: T. rex; At least 10 skeletons in varying degrees of completeness.
T. luanchuanensis; Teeth and associated postcrania.
T bataar; 5 skulls, associated postcrania.
COMMENTS: One of the largest ever theropods, it stood 5m (16 ft) tall and weighed 6.4 tonnes. Its feet had 3 clawed toes pointing forwards with a smaller one at the back. The tiny arms ended in clawed, 2 fingered hands. The jaw was 1.5m (4.5 ft) long with 18cm (0.6 ft), saw-like teeth. There has been considerable debate as to whether it was a relatively slow scavenger or a fast predator. Estimates of speed vary between 30 and 50 kph (20 - 30 mph). Other evidence in favour of the predator thesis includes its size (no large scavengers exist today), relatively large brain, large eyes with stereoscopic vision, and a keen sense of smell. It may have lived and hunted in family groups. The last of the predatory dinosaurs. First found in 1902. The most complete skeleton of a T. rex yet found, nicknamed 'Sue', was sold at auction by Sothebys in October, 1997 for a record fossil price of $7.62 million to a consortium of supporters on behalf of the Chicago Field Museum, where it will be ! prepared and displayed.
SPECIES LIST:

T. rex Osborn, 1905 (type), that includes T. imperiosus Osborn, 1905/Swinton, 1970, T. giganteus Harlan, 1990 (nomen nudum), T. stanwinstonorum Pickering, 1995 (nomen nudum, the famous "Sue"), Dynamosaurus imperiosus and Manospondylus gigas.

T. bataar Maleev, 1955, that includes T. turpanensis Zhai, Zheng and Tong, 1978 and Tarbosaurus bataar. Olshevsky has proposed the name Jenghizkhan bataar for this specimen.

T. luanchuanensis Dong, 1979. Olshevsky has proposed Jenghizkhan luanchuanensis for this species, which he considers a nomen dubium.

T. amplus Marsh, 1892/Hay, 1930 is a nomen dubium included with Stygivenator amplus.

T. efremovi Maleev, 1955/Rozhdestvensky, 1977 is included with Tarbosaurus efremovi.

T. lanpingensis Yeh, 1975 is known only from a tooth and is a nomen dubium included with Tarbosaurus lanpingensis.

T lanpingi Zhao, 1986 is included with Tarbosaurus lanpingensis.

T. torosus Russell, 1970/Paul, 1987 is a junior synonym of Daspletosaurus torosus.

T. turpanensis Zhai, Zheng and Tong, 1978 is a nomen dubium included with Tarbosaurus turpanensis.

T. imperator* Informal name. Still under excavation. Suspected to be up to 20 percent bigger than T. Rex. Tyrannosaurid.

REFERENCES:
Tyrannosaurids (Dinosauria) of Asia and North America Carpenter, K., Mateer, N. and Chen, P. in ASPECTS OF NONMARINE CRETACEOUS GEOLOGY China Ocean Press, 250 - 268 (1992).
Variation in Tyrannosaurus rex Carpenter, K. in Carpenter, K. & Currie, P.J. [Eds].
Dinosaur Systematics. Approaches and Perspectives Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, New York etc. i-xiii, 1-318. Chapter Pagination: 141-145 (1990).
Tyrannosaurus and Other Cretaceous Carnivorous Dinosaurs Osborn, H.F. BULLETIN OF THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY 21; 259 - 265 (1905).
Gigantic Carnivorous Dinosaurs of Mongolia Maleev, E. DOKLADY AKAD. NAUK. S.S.S.R. 104; 634 - 637 and 779 - 782 (1955).
Tyrannosaurus and Torosaurus, Maastrichtian Dinosaurs from Trans-Pecos, Texas Lawson, D. JOURNAL OF PALEONTOLOGY 50; 158 - 164 (1976).
Tyrannosaurs from the Late Cretaceous of Western Canada Russell, D. NATIONAL MUSEUMS OF CANADA PUBLICATIONS IN PALEONTOLOGY 1; 1 - 34 (1970).
Tyrannosaurus rex from the McRae Formation, (Lancian, Upper Cretaceous), Elephant Butte Reservoir, Sierra County, New Mexico Gillette, D., Wolberg, D. and Hunt, A. NEW MEXICO GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY FIELD CONFERENCE GUIDEBOOK 37; 235-238 (1986).
The Cranial Morphology of Tyrannosaurus rex Molnar, R. PALAEONTOGRAPHICA ABTEILUNG A PALAEOZOOLOGIE-STRATIGRAPHIE 217(4-6); 137-176 (1991). Dong Zhiming.
Dinosaur Fossils from the Cretaceous of South China in IVPP Acad. Sinica, Nanjing Inst. Geol. Paleontol. Acad. Sinica (eds.) The Mesozoic and Cenozoic Red Beds of South China. "Selected papers from The field conference on the South China Cretaceous - Early Tertiary Red Beds" held at Nanxiong, Guangdong Province [24 Nov - 6 Dec 1976]. Kexue Chubanshe [= Science Press], Beijing, China. (1979).
[Stratigraphy of the Mammal-bearing Tertiary of the Turfan Basin, Sinkiang] Zhai, R., Zheng J., and Tong Y. MEM. INST. VERT. PALEONTOL. PALEOANTHROPOL. 13; 68-81 (1978). (In Chinese).

(Brad, you looking for this?)
from Honkie Tong~Again!, age 16, Singapore, Singapore, Singapore; October 2, 2000

I think I will sum up this second debate with the following frequently asked questions and answers: Tyrannosaurus rex
Q. Why are people so obsessed with arguing over whether or not T. rex was a scavenger or a hunter when most scavengers sometimes hunt and most predatory animals I know of will scavenge if the opportunity presents itself? I think T. rex was...BOTH. (scary concept!)

A. Scary thought indeed! Modern day predators are opportunists and there's no reason to think that T. rex was any different. There's always a problem when people try to make an either…or classification. Like extinction theories - why not a combination of factors. Disease spread through dinosaur populations as a result of migration across land-bridges which meant the animals were unable to adapt when the meteor impact/volcanic activity changed the climate (the reverse - climatic change affected the dinosaurs ability to resist disease - could also be true!)

Q1. Is sight or the sense of smell more important to a predator?

Q2. Ever since I viewed the movie, "Jurassic Park", I wondered how we know that the T-rex responds with sight more than it does with its other senses if the only evidence we have to study these ancient creatures are their fossils and bones. How do we know about behavioral and biological actions by just studying an organism's bones and fossils?

A. Actually, the evidence suggests that T rex's sense of smell was more important than vision. Interpretation involves a detailed knowledge of anatomy, physiology, pathology and modern animal behavior. Attachment sites on the bones reveal size of muscles/tendons, you have probably seen TV programs showing facial reconstruction of primitive humans by building up the muscle layers first. We do the same with dinosaurs.
Vision
First, while it seems logical that stereovision would be an asset for any predatory animal, it has to be admitted that there are a lot of predators that seem to get by just fine without it. Lizards are usually carnivorous, and only one (Chameleo) has stereovision. However, it is probably fair to say that stereovision does confer an advantage to predators which go after prey which fight back or run away.
Smell
Also, I believe that a dog actually has a better sense of smell than a cat. That's part of the reason that a dog's nose is longer than a cat's --more room for olfactory tissue. Cats overcome the disadvantage of a poorer sense of smell by having better vision, especially night vision.
Body shape
Cats are better at sneaking up on their prey, getting very close before they charge. The flexible body of the cat is better suited to creeping along the ground, and their colour pattern provides better camouflage. The dog's strategy is more cursorial - running after the prey until it starts to slow down from exhaustion. The keen canine sense of smell helps dogs to keep track of prey even if they lose visual contact.
Pathology
Evidence of hadrosaur tail vertebrae damaged by T. rex attacks: There's an Edmontosaurus at the Denver Museum of Natural History that appears to have had a bite taken out of the top of its tail. Ken Carpenter took some thin sections of the neural spines and found a fragment of tyrannosaur tooth embedded in one of them. The fact that the bone shows evidence of healing after it was broken indicates that the damage was inflicted while the animal was alive, and thus is not the result of scavenging.
Hunters versus scavengers
The only animals that qualify as 100% scavengers are vultures - and, of course, they cheat. From 500 meters up, a vulture can see for kilometers in every direction and spot carcasses from far away. They use up very little energy gliding down to feed. You can be a "pure" scavenger, you just have to able to fly. But there certainly aren't any 100% scavengers that live on the ground.I'm not sure I'd say that a predator "obviously wants live prey." I've seen films of lions eating meat that was literally crawling with maggots, and they sure didn't seem to be any less enthusiastic about eating it. In fact, dead meat is really just meat that you don't have to work for. Certainly there are predators that won't scavenge - snakes for example - but I don't think it's accurate to say that in general predators want live prey. (Another problem in Jurassic Park .. when Sam Neill says "T. rex doesn't want to be fed, he wants to hunt." SAYS WHO?
Comparisons:
There is an implication in the film that predators all get within the general vicinity of their prey using smell, then locate it by hearing, and use vision for the attack. While that certainly may be true for some, this sequence is by no means universal. A snake is as deaf as a post, and can't locate its prey by sound. Instead they use a combination of smell, heat sensors, and sight. Birds don't usually use smell to locate their prey, especially hawks which attack from great heights. It would be correct to say that Tyrannosaurus hunting techniques didn't involve the use of arms. Something for Dr. Horner to keep in mind is that lizards, even lizards that go after large prey (like the komodo dragon), attack with their teeth alone and don't use the front limbs at all. If they can do it, so can T. rex, especially when you consider that compared to a komodo dragon, a T rex had much stronger teeth and the advantage of stereovision.

Phew! So we're right back where we started. T. Rex is certainly not a pathetic scavenger, as we said, T.Rex hunted when he had to, and scavenged when it was convient.
from Honkie Tong Ka Fong, age 16, Singapore, Asia, Singapore; October 2, 2000

cool
from cody, age 9, ?, ?, ?; October 2, 2000

Did you know… That my brother is a rare species of dinosaur. Well, not really. But dino's are interesting. If you want to find anything on dino's, then go to google, type in your search, ie. Jurassic period, then it will almost definately (i dunno how to spell definately) come up with a ZoomDinosuars site! So it must be really good. Seeya, Fuzzy Chicken. P.S. Is any other year 6 class doing dinosaurs as a subject?
from Fuzzy Chicken (girl), age 11, Sydney, NSW, Austraila; October 2, 2000

No, I don't think the Raptors were mainly scavengers, though most T.Rex fans would like to think so, as most Raptor fans are in the scavenger camp in this debate. The switchblade claw is certainly designed for killing as it had no use in scavenging. I think the raptors hunted more than they scavenged. They were built for it. Another question. Most dinos didn't drag their tail, but what about Tenotosaurus? That dino had a thich heavy tail but didn't have a counterbalancing head. In fact, mordern drawings of it still show it dragging its tail! Too bad no tracks have be found yet.
from Honkie Tong, age 16, ?, ?, ?; October 2, 2000

Yeah, all thanks to that guy Neil. He posted a message to start it all off again. Sigh...... The worst thing is, He is not responding to all the rebutals. Hey, Brad, did you think he chickened out?
from Honkie Tong, age 16, ?, ?, ?; October 2, 2000

Phillip, are you a fan of Walking with Dinosaurs? :) I don't think any dinosaurs have been found in Illonois (although I'm not sure about the non-dinosaurs).
from Brad, age 13, Woodville, ON, Canada; October 1, 2000

Violent debate on T. rex? I thought we finished that a while ago. T. rex hunted and scavenged as it needed to, it was neither a pathetic full-time scavenger or a super killing machine. I don't think there are any carnivores that won't scavenge or kill. (PS. I think it was Dale Russell that proposed 'raptors were mostly scavengers, I'll look into that.)
from Brad, age 13, Woodville, ON, Canada; October 1, 2000

I just love dinosaurs! Most of my firends call me Dinosaur Lady! I don't know why I like dinosaurs.But how they died is what I want to know!
from Emily, age 8, Exton, P.A., ?; October 1, 2000

I live in the Midwest, a few hours away from Chicago. My favorite dinosaurs are Utahraptor, T-Rex, Torosaurus, Ankylosaurus, and Bactrosaurus. I also like Mammoths, Postosuchus,Placerias, Liopleurodon, Cryptoclidus, Iberomesornis, Koolasuchus,and Pterodon. Could I find any of these around here?
from Phillip S, age 10, Sterling, Illinois, United States; October 1, 2000

Hey guys, another Dino Warz installment comin' up to commerate T-Rex's crossing of the big 2-0-0-0
from Bill M., age ?, ?, ?, ?; October 1, 2000

Austin, I can't disagree with you, Utaraptor is probally the deadilest carnivore.....from the plant-eater's point of view. Utaraptor probally had the highest hunt sucess ration of all. But if you are looking for the offical deadilest carnivore, T-Rex still holds the title, because we are still not sure if Utaraptor hunted in a pack. If Utaraptor hunted alone, it would not be the deadilest dino of all after all. Then again, new evidence does show T-Rex did hunt in packs, making it even deadiler than the any Raptor pack. I suspect though, the Raptors still hold the title of being the deadilest predator to small prey, as T-Rex and all the other big carnivores cannot catch them. Oh yes, Austin, Brad, what is your outtake on this pretty violent debate on T-Rex, Neil, where are you?
from Honkie Tong, age ?, ?, ?, ?; October 1, 2000