New research released Monday suggests that ferocious tyrannosaur dinosaurs were more like social carnivores like wolves than solitary predators as previously thought.
Paleontologists came up with the idea while researching a mass tyrannosaur death site discovered seven years ago in southern Utah's Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. The Guardian the monument will be restored to its full size.
Tyrannosaur Dinosaurs Died Together: Are They Social Predators?
The shocking find in the monument's "Rainbows and Unicorns Quarry" adds to the growing body of evidence that tyrannosaurs were social predators, The Washington Post said.
The researchers said a group of four or five Teratophoneus died together during a seasonal flooding event that washed their carcasses into a lake. The bones, which were undisturbed for a long time, slowly moved as a river churned through the field before evaporating.
Paleontologist Alan Titus, who discovered the quarry site in 2014, told reporters that many scientists believe these animals lacked the mental capacity to participate in such complex actions. However, he claims that this observation, along with other recent discoveries, proves otherwise.
Titus said that this could be reflecting the dinosaur's behavior and "not just a freak event happening over and over again."
Titus also told The Associated Press that these animals likely lived near one another without moving together in a social community. He presumed that these animals just came together as times got harder to share diminishing resources.
The new Utah site is the third mass tyrannosaur gravesite discovered in North America.
The monument, which spans nearly 1 million acres of BLM land, offers a nearly complete picture of the late Cretaceous period, which lasted roughly 95 million to 74 million years ago. Climate change and a mass extinction event occurred shortly after this date due to volcanic eruptions and an asteroid collision with Earth.
More Studies Needed To Support Claim
The recent discovery supported a hypothesis that they lived in packs that were first proposed 20 years ago. However, more research is needed to support that claim, according to Kristi Curry Rogers, a Macalester College biology professor who wasn't involved in the study but reviewed the findings on Monday.
"It is a little tougher to be so sure that these data mean that these tyrannosaurs lived together in the good times," Rogers told The Telegraph. "It's possible that these animals may have lived in the same vicinity as one another without travelling together in a social group, and just came together around dwindling resources as times got tougher."
When more than a dozen tyrannosaurs were discovered at a site in Alberta, Canada, the theory of social tyrannosaurs was born. Another mass extinction site in Montana has resurrected the idea of social tyrannosaurs. Many scientists challenged the hypothesis, claiming that dinosaurs lacked the intelligence to participate in complex social interaction, according to Titus.
Researchers discovered seven species of turtles, several fish and ray species, two other types of dinosaurs, and a nearly complete skeleton of a juvenile Deinosuchus alligator in addition to the tyrannosaurs. These other species don't seem to have died at the same time.
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