WWE Dinosaurs – How Dinosaurs Faught

In the Late Cretaceous period, most of Georgia state was underwater. Giant creatures lived on thin strips of land and the ocean below and battled to survive this prehistoric world. Everything was bigger, sharper. Welcome to 100 million years ago, and welcome, my friends, to this year’s Summer Reading. To kick us off, let’s look at some of the dinosaurs that would have been right on this spot and how paleontologists believe they fought to survive.

Albertosaurus

[photo by Willem van Valkenburg of an Albertosaurous display in the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Alberta, Canada under a Creative Commons 2.0 license]

At 30mph, the Albertosaurus was the fastest dino of its time and location, with fossils found all over North America. Because dozens of individuals have been found together, scientists surmise they lived and hunted in groups, using clever hunting tactics like sending the smaller and younger of the pack to act as bait and drive prey straight into the powerful jaws of their biggest – CHOMP.

Though hunting is a dangerous game for any creature, sometimes the biggest threat to an Albertosaurus is another Albertosaurus. Bite marks found on their skulls suggest the species fought within the pack to show who’s the boss.

Lophorhothon

[Downhill, a painting of a herd of Hadrosaurs by Scott Elyard posted to ArtEvolved under a Creative Commons 3.0 license]

These duck-billed herbivores were prey. In their same ornithischian or “bird-hipped” clade lived the Triceratops with its horns and hard skull and the Stegosaurus with its spikes and whiplike tail, but Hadrosaurs like the Lophorhothon had none of these defenses. So how did they fight to survive against predators like the Albertosaurus? Well, they too used speed and group tactics, because here’s what Hadrosaurs had on all the other ornithischians: the most complex brains. Running in herds and outsmarting their predators were the Lophorhothon’s primary defense.

Megalodon

[Scientific illustration of a Megalodon in its habitat by Alex Boersma published under PNAS]

Though not technically a dinosaur, how could we leave out the world’s biggest prehistoric shark when they are one of the most abundant fossils in the GA area? Even an amateur paleontologist can pick up their teeth on the shores of the islands just off the coast of the GA mainland.

Megalodons had a bite power of 41,000 pounds of force, and their five rows of 7-inch teeth ripped and rended their prey. These were ambush predators. Instead of pursuing, they would stealthily hide themselves until just the right moment to jump out at the unsuspecting prey and chomp them to bits too quickly to even react. And how did such a giant creature go unnoticed? The Megalodon had highly attuned super senses on top of all their offensive power.

Battle like a Dinosaur

If you’d like to try out some tactics yourself, you may be interested in one of our upcoming summer reading events: family martial arts on Tuesday June 23^rd at 3pm at the Northside branch. Come learn how to use your natural adaptations as the most dangerous predator of all: a human. Happy summer reading, all!