Jungle-like scene with various sized dinosaurs including one in the sky.
How do paleontologists know how dinosaurs behaved? Their only evidence of dinosaur behavior comes from fossils and inference from living animals. Image via Willgard Krause/ Pixabay.
Paleontologists are the scientists who study dinosaurs. Everything they know about dinosaurs comes from examining the animals’ fossilized remains and footsteps.
So how and what can they know about dinosaur behavior? They can see the bones inside a dinosaur’s stomach to know what it ate, but whether it was preyed upon or scavenged remains unclear.
New techniques are helping to discover facts such as what color different parts of the dinosaurs were. From this info and knowledge of modern-day animals, paleontologists can infer camouflage, attracting a mate and more.
By David Hone, Queen Mary University of London
Fossils hint at dinosaur behavior
How do scientists study the behavior of dinosaurs, who died 65 million years ago? After all, dinosaur fossils are rare enough as it is, and most are fragments and difficult to work with.
This is something paleontologists have been working on since the earliest days of research on these incredible animals. Until recently, this was often only in vague terms of, for example, which animals were herbivores or carnivores.
But new opportunities are becoming available to us. Paleontologists have recently pieced together the colors and patterns of some feathered dinosaurs. They did so using electron microscopes to see tiny preserved structures that used to contain the pigments of the animals in life. This is something that scientists used to think was probably impossible.
But right now it can only tell us so much. It just tells us the color of the individual animal at the time of its death.
Read more: Why is life on Earth so colorful?
Colors of dinosaurs
Studying more specimens of the same species could reveal if males and females were the same colors or if they differed. And it could tell us if these feathers underwent seasonal changes or varied with the environment. Perhaps they turned white in winter as camouflage. Maybe feathers were different colors in different regions. This would suggest the local environment helped these dinosaurs to hide and that they cannot have been wide ranging or their camouflage would not work.
Perhaps the males were brightly colored to attract mates. Or perhaps both were, which would suggest both sexes were involved in rearing their offspring.
This is something scientists should be able to tackle in the coming years. For some species at least, such as the small feathered dinosaur Anchiornis, we have the fossils, and we have the techniques. We just need to extract the data from the dinosaur fossils we have.
Extrapolating from knowledge of living animals
We already have a good idea of what colors and patterns mean for different groups of living animals. So we can apply some of this knowledge to dinosaurs. However, much of researchers’ work on dinosaur behavior has been stunted by a poor use of the behavior of modern animals as a template for dinosaurs. Plus, there’s a tendency to focus on special specimens as being representative of bigger patterns.
For example, we have well-studied fossils of carnivorous dinosaurs with the bones of other animals inside them. So it’s incontrovertible that the carnivorous dinosaurs ate these other animals. But it is hard – or even impossible – to know if the prey was scavenged or if it was hunted by the dinosaur.
It’s too easy to think the dinosaur lived on the species the bones belonged to. Bones tend to survive the fossilization process. But the animal might have mostly eaten muscle and organs, or even insects and they wouldn’t show up. Although such finds are important, we need to take them as evidence that something happened once, not that it was a habitual activity. Then we can go in search of other evidence to test or reject such an idea.
An advancing science
In that context, we really are blessed. We are still discovering new fossils and new techniques (such as CT scans to get inside skulls to dinosaur brain to assess them). And there are perhaps more dinosaur researchers than ever before, even if that total is not that high compared to other disciplines.
It means that we are continually getting insights and new lines of evidence about things. That includes how and what dinosaurs ate, their underlying physiology, the environments they lived in, how they moved and how they changed as they grew. This is the raw material of studies for behavior. And adding this kind of data to our understanding of the behavior of modern animals has enormous potential for future studies of dinosaurs (and other prehistoric animals).
Dinosaur behavior: Lone wolves or social animals?
Another angle to consider is how paleontologists formulate their ideas about dinosaur behavior in the first place. For example, although we have numerous examples of several individuals of a dinosaur species found together, this doesn’t meant that the species habitually lived in groups, let alone that their near relatives did.
Cats are generally solitary animals. But if you inferred the social behavior of lions or cheetah from tigers and puma, you’d think these animals lived their lives alone. The fact is that lions and male cheetahs usually live in groups.
But they are sometimes solitary and will switch between being solo or living together at various times in their lives. So taking from the position that one group of dinosaurs died near each other means they and their relatives lived together won’t help us understand how they were really living.
The future of the study of dinosaur behavior is looking bright. This is why I wanted to write a book on the subject and to explore the issues we have had before, but frame the successes that are happening. Coupled with more rigorous attempts to investigate and test our hypotheses, we can establish a much firmer ground for understanding how these incredible creatures lived.The Conversation
A woman in a park ranger's uniform sits on a wall embedded with large dinosaur fossils.
Paleontologist and park ranger ReBecca Hunt-Foster sits among dinosaur fossils at the Quarry Exhibit Hall in Dinosaur National Monument in Utah. Paleontologists learn about the behavior of dinosaurs by studying their fossils. Image via NPS.
Watch: A hike to dinosaur footprints
David Hone, Senior Lecturer in Zoology, Queen Mary University of London
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Bottom line: What do paleontologists know about dinosaur behavior and how do they know it? All we have of them is their fossils. Read on to find out what we can know.
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