New findings from Grand-Staircase Escalante suggest tyrannosaurs may have hunted and lived in groups – St George News

ST. GEORGE – In popular media such as ‘Jurassic Park’, ‘The Land Before Time’ and ‘King Kong’, large carnivorous dinosaurs such as the Tyrannosaurus rex are always portrayed as lone and fiercely competitive hunters. How terrifying it is to imagine that even one of the titanic carnivores is chasing you as prey, it’s even more cold to consider trying to escape at the same time. Recent research, however, suggests that may have been the case.

In 2014, paleontologists working in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument found a bunch of fossils containing four tyrannosaurus specimens. Over the next seven years, the research team thoroughly excavated numerous fossils and led them through dr. Alan Titus, a paleontologist from the Bureau of Land Management.

At a press conference held on Monday morning, Titus and some of his peers studied the Teratophone remnants announced that at least some of these old carnivores were social and possibly lived and hunted in groups.

“I’ve talked to a lot of tyrannosaurus researchers, and one couple in particular insist that these animals simply do not have the brain power to practice sophisticated social interaction,” Titus said. “With tyrannosaurs, you look at a unique genus of predatory dinosaurs called Coelurosauria.”

Titus said that one of the most important features of the Coelurosauria is an enlarged brain.

“They actually have a larger cranial volume than their opponents or ancestors,” he said. “We interpret that it opens the door to possible increased computing power, if you will, in the brain and the development of social behavior.”

One might ask why such a large and powerful predator needs any help to hunt. One contributing researcher, dr. Joseph Sertich, at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, said that social behavior may have helped the dinosaurs hunt larger prey and reduce individual risk.

“The same rocks that buried it Teratophone group also buries incredible horn dinosaurs such as Cosmoceratops and Utahceratops and very large hadrosauruses such as Gryposaurus and the Crested Parasaurolophus, ”said Sertich. “Because they were in a social unit, these tyrannosaurs might have had a better chance of tackling some of these really big or really dangerous herbivores.”

Unravel the mystery

The project at the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument became an international research effort and the research team published its findings in the scientific journal PeerJ.

Fossils from the site were excavated, cleaned and examined by BLM paleontologists, including Titus and Katja Knoll, laboratory manager. Thorough investigation has revealed that the fossils of many individual tyrannosaurs are of different ages and sizes, as well as other prehistoric fauna such as ancient turtles, fish and an almost complete Deinosuchus skeleton.

“One of these things is definitely not like the others, and that would be the tyrannosaurs,” Titus said. ‘How then did these tyrannosaurs end up in a lake? It became the first mystery we had to solve. ‘

By analyzing the soil from the excavation site and comparing it with the minerals and rocks trapped in the fossils, the researchers concluded that the dinosaurs were not actually buried at the layer and that they may have been reburied after environmental changes. .

This left researchers wondering if the tyrannosaurus remains had simply accumulated in the riverbed over time, which would not confirm any theories about their social behavior, Titus said.

Dr. Celina Suarez of the University of Arkansas, along with Dr. Daigo Yamamura, did a geochemical analysis of all the fossils to compare them and find out if they differ in important ways.

“We can look at the diet, temperature and even the type of water or the isotopic composition of water that different animals drank,” Suarez said. “The Teratophone, the fish, the turtles, the crocodilians and the carbonate buds (rock samples of the same soil layer) have very similar earth pattern patterns, indicating that they all died and were fossilized together. ”

Using these geochemical tools, the fossils were also dated to about 76 million years ago. Now that they knew the fossils belonged together and were not deceptively grouped, the researchers were led to wonder what they could have brought together.

Titus said that the excess and the apparent cause of death – floods – are strikingly consistent with the earliest discovered and perhaps best-known evidence for social tyrannosaurs.

In the late nineties, dr. Phil Currie, a Canadian paleontologist, begins digging the Dry Island Buffalo Jump site in the province of Alberta. There he discovers the remains of at least 12 tyrannosaurs of different ages who were apparently killed in another mass event. He theorized that the find represented evidence of social behavior, although it was directly contrary to popular science theory, Titus said.

The discovery at the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument is the first of its kind in the southwestern United States, but it contributes to an increasing amount of evidence that apparently supports the previous hypothesis of Drs. Currie confirms. Tyrannosaurs were perhaps more intelligent and social than previously believed.

Understanding of the research site

The fossils were discovered in the Kaiparowits subunit of the National Monument, on a site now known as the “Rainbows and Unicorns Quarry”. Titus said the name came up during a phone conversation between two of his colleagues.

” A former employee of mine … thought I was a little too enthusiastic about every fossil site I’ve ever found. ‘

Titus said colleagues often jokingly accused him of claiming that every site, including the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, was “rainbows and unicorns all the time.”

In this case, however, Titus’ colleagues agree that the terrain at the monument is really as good as it looked.

“And so the name just stuck out.” ‘

The researchers even brought a stuffed, rainbow-colored unicorn toy to the graveyard as a mascot.

Home Secretary Deb Haaland recently visited the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument, where she hung out with Titus and handled some of the fossil samples. Although no official action has been taken by the Biden government to restore Utah’s national monuments to their greatness before Trump, the president has regularly promised so much during his 2020 campaign.

The site Rainbows and Unicorns remains within the confines of the shrinking monument, but some conservationists fear that many such areas lie outside current boundaries and could be vulnerable to exploitation or unconscious destruction.

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