{"id":17568,"date":"2012-09-13T20:26:09","date_gmt":"2012-09-13T23:26:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/?p=17568"},"modified":"2012-09-13T20:26:09","modified_gmt":"2012-09-13T23:26:09","slug":"ask-the-researchers-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/ask-the-researchers-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Ask the researchers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-17574\" title=\"009_Wiki_195-1\" src=\"http:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/009_Wiki_195-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"580\" height=\"276\" srcset=\"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/009_Wiki_195-1.jpg 580w, https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/009_Wiki_195-1-120x57.jpg 120w, https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/009_Wiki_195-1-250x119.jpg 250w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 580px) 100vw, 580px\" \/><span class=\"media-credits-inline\">Eduardo Cesar<\/span>Might it be that the <em>Tyrannosaurus rex<\/em>, the giant of the predator dinosaurs, with just over 60 teeth in its mouth, actually took advantage of what other animals hunted instead of capturing its own prey? This discussion has been keeping paleontologists busy for a century and it changes as knowledge advances. One clue indicating that the <em>T. rex<\/em> were not very good hunters is the equivalent length of the bones in their hind paws \u2013 the femur and the tibia \u2013 which made them poor runners. Even so, there are signs that they did attack large dinosaurs, as a fossil of an <em>Edmontosaurus<\/em> indicates. This has the marks of a partially healed bite in one of its vertebrae, indicating that a <em>T. Rex <\/em>had tried to kill it (but failed). Two major difficulties stand in the way of finding a definitive answer to the <em>T. Rex\u2019<\/em>s feeding habits: the scarcity of complete dinosaur fossils and the rarity of exclusive carnivores among the animals living today. The only one is the vulture, whose sense of smell is ultra-sensitive. It can also fly over huge distances to find food. The most likely thing is that <em>T. Rex<\/em> was able to capture even large prey, provided it did not have to run very far, and without its disregarding the carrion it might have found along its way.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Luiz Eduardo Anelli<\/strong><br \/>\n<em>Institute of Geosciences of the University of S\u00e3o Paulo<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How is it known if dinosaurs hunted or scavenged?","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[170],"tags":[255],"coauthors":[785],"class_list":["post-17568","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-wiki-en","tag-paleontology"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17568","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17568"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17568\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17568"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17568"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=17568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}