"Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior" by David Hone

Whenever the Jurassic Park/World franchise launches another movie entry, the national media runs to quote “a dinosaur guy” for a professional analysis. One of the guys they call is David Hone, a zoologist at Queen Mary University in London and the author of How Fast Did T.rex Run? and the Tyrannosaur Chronicles.Hone’s latest book, Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior (Princeton University Press), seeks to provide answers as to how dinosaurs may have moved, fed, grew, and reproduced.Deducing dinosaur behavior isn’t easy when all you’ve got to go on are a few bones but Hone believes it’s possible. His book uses comparisons to living species as well as referencing the latest studies on prehistoric behavior. Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior uses diagrams, photographs, and the artwork of Florida artist Gabriel Ugueto to flesh out the dinosaur behavior picture.Hone said discoveries from two centuries of research have expanded our view of life on the planet 70 million years ago. “We’ve been in a golden age of dinosaur discovery for the past 30 or 40 years and I don’t see it stopping anytime soon. Dinosaurs are no longer considered the cold-blooded, tail-dragging, stupid, lizard-like monsters of the Victorian age, but are instead recognized as animals that were upright, active, fast-growing, and if not especially intelligent, certainly not stupid,” he said.Hone's a critic when it comes to the latest Jurassic Park movies. “The first ones (starting in 1993) were fine but the last few have been really woeful—both as movies and as a dinosaur spectacle,” he said. Dinosaurs depicted in recent films are less accurate than the Jurassic Park movies of 30 years ago, noted Hone.As a scientist and writer whose first two books focused on the Tyrannosaurus rex, Hone is in a good position to comment on the creature he classifies as one of a kind. “Take an orca (killer whale) and put it on legs and you’ve got an extraordinary predator. Probably more scientific papers have been written about T.rex than any other dinosaur,” he said.As for how fast a T.rex run can run, Hone said a beast that could reach a weight of seven tons could make 15 mph--not enough to challenge a Jeep as depicted in the first Jurassic Park movie but it could definitely outrun a man, he said. The T.rex  may have lost a battle with a Spinosaurus in Jurassic Park 3 but the author, whose next book will focus on Spinosaurus research, says that outcome would have been unlikely. T.rex had a decided size advantage, said Hone, comparing the confrontation as combat between a lion and a cheetah.Figuring out how creatures behaved millions of years ago remains an ongoing challenge for scientists but Hone said it’s worth remembering that “the sum total of the behaviors of dinosaurs across 1,500 species and 170 million years were much more complex and interesting than we can ever know.”