Podcast 320 - von Herrerasaurus

The gang discusses two papers that investigate injuries in fossil bones. The first paper tests hypotheses about the causes of facial injuries in herrarasaurids, and the second paper tests if inferred hunting strategies map onto injury patterns in predators from the La Brea Tar Pits. Meanwhile, Curt provides some hypotheses, Amanda gets spiritual, and James is photogenic.   Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition): The friends talk about two papers that look at why animals from a long time ago got hurt. The first paper looks at some very old and angry animals with no hair that all got hurt in the face. They try to see why these animals got hurt in the face. They look at all the ways that they could have got hurt in the face and find that it was probably other animals just like them that they lived with that probably hurt them in the face. The second paper looks at two groups of animals that eat other animals. One group of animals is man's best friend, and the other group of animals is from a group that does not care if man lives or dies. Since these two groups of animals are old and from a long time ago we don't know really what they ate but we use other things to come up with thoughts on how they could eat. We look to animals today that are like these animals and think that maybe these old animals ate the same way. But, trying to eat other animals is hard and can get you hurt, and you can get hurt in a lot of the same ways if you jump or run. This paper looks at how they got hurt to see if this fits with how we think they would eat. Turns out that the ways they were hurt makes sense if they ate way we think they ate, with man's best friend running and man's not best friend running.   References: Garcia, Mauricio S., Ricardo N. Martínez, and Rodrigo T. Müller. "Craniofacial lesions in the earliest predatory dinosaurs indicate intraspecific agonistic behaviour at the dawn of the dinosaur era." The Science of Nature 112.2 (2025): 1-12. Brown, Caitlin, et al. "Skeletal trauma reflects hunting behaviour in extinct sabre-tooth cats and dire wolves." Nature Ecology & Evolution 1.5 (2017): 0131.