Seems dangerous to infer too much about the general behavior of entire species based on the observed behavior captured in two individuals at the moment they were being entombed in the lava flow from a volcanic eruption.
Like assuming that based on some skeletons found under a volcanic ash flow that the normal behavior of humans was running with your hands in the air and screaming really loudly.
This single group of humans almost always assumed the fetal position. Fortunately we were able to get a glimpse of this because they were captured in a lava flow. We may never know why they did that.
It was a mud flow. It likely came on extremely fast while they were distracted by their life and death struggle, and not necessarily during a dramatic eruption.
Additionally, it's a pretty solid prior to assume that, when we find rapidly forming fossils like this, the behaviors they capture were common behaviors. Fossil formation is rare, so a fossil capturing a rare behavior is pretty darn unlikely. A behavior would have to be ellicted many, many times to have a likely chance of being preserved in a fossil.
Surely they exist, and this could be one of them, but until we find evidence to the contrary our best guess should be that this was a common behavior.
> Experts revealed the 125m-year-old fossil that froze in time after being taken on by a small mammal a third of its size. They are tangled together, the mammal’s teeth sunk into the beaked dinosaur’s ribs, its left paw clasping the beast’s lower jaw.
I'm pretty sure my little dog would do something similar if she encountered a wild boar in the forest. I'm quite sure that if I were successfully chased down by a velociraptor, I would not just lay down and wait to be eaten.
> Researchers said the discovery challenged a long-held view of early mammals as “fodder” for dinosaurs.
I don't really get how that "challenges" any view at all. As if dinosaurs never got bitten nor scratched by stuff they were trying to eat. And with an erupting volcano nearby, I'd probably fight harder just for the hell of it and to mess with the palaeontologists.
Velociraptors were roughly turkey sized. I doubt one could eat a healthy human. The Jurassic Park "raptors" were badge-engineered Deinonychus.
There's a smaller predator, larger prey phenomenon I find fascinating, and it has to do with how a modern dinosaur -- the peregrine falcon -- takes its prey. It literally falcon-punches its victim -- diving at high speed to strike with a closed talon. It can make a meal of a bird about twice its size this way, though usually it feeds on pigeons, other small birds, and the occasional small reptile or mammal.
Their noodle necks would only be strong enough to draw blood and maybe slowly tear flesh. They looked to rely on their razor like teeth more than jaw strength. A human could beat them with kick.
Anyone says they have a strong bite doesn't pay attention to other animals with similar jaws. Crocodiles for example can do 3700 PSI but is supported by a rigid neck and doesn't have to deal with the weight to support its jaws. This is also support by a jaw snapping mechanism. You could effectively hold a crocodiles mouth shut with no force at all. This would say the Jarasic Park ones had 1000 PSI, but real life ones 100 PSI and the teeth did all the work. Yeah I think humans have a stronger jaw, further the mouth extends from the jaw the more muscle it needs.
Looked up a caiman bite force it about 400 PSI. There are some that can do more but it makes sense crocodile bite force is how much it can do with its weight. Slightly larger than a chicken Dino isn't going to compete with a caiman.
Are horses and cows herbivores or carnivores? You'll probably say they're herbivores, but there are plenty of videos of them eating small animals (like baby chicks).
But Brusatte said there remained some legitimate concerns about the integrity of the fossil. “There have been doctored fossils from this part of the world before, and the scientists did not dig up this specimen themselves. The skeletons are no doubt genuine, but I suppose the poses of the bones could have been altered, although I have no direct evidence for this,” he said.
The downstream effects of a post-truth post-trust era.
> The downstream effects of a post-truth post-trust era.
All this era has shown us, is that we should never have been relying on trust in anything even close to science. Trusting people to put the truth their own career advancement is how we got into this mess with the replication crisis.
But there's a difference between trusting two rival institutions that come to the same conclusion, and trusting a single research team that stands to advance quite significantly from a particular publishing.
I'm not anti-science. I'm saying we screwed up bigtime trusting people within the institutions we put up to manage science. Especially in the soft sciences.
We let things go without serious peer review or replication far too long, and allowed far too dodgy statistics, resulting in the replication crisis we see today. Science is amazing, but we haven't been doing science in certain areas for a number of years. We're going to be sorting this out for at least the next decade. We should start again at some point, and that starts with clearing out all the crank theories that have made their way into journals that either don't replicate or have no predictive power.
We shouldn't have been relying on trust in the beginning. We should have been doing replications.
So if I’m understanding correctly: no structured sharing of scientific ideas until they’re replicated? By what mechanism do you propose people find novel studies that seem interesting enough to replicate?
> So if I’m understanding correctly: no structured sharing of scientific ideas until they’re replicated?
No, you don't. I'm actually struggling to think of a more extreme interpretation of my words.
Trying something novel is fine. But trying something out, getting a single result, treating it as gospel, and not even trying to find the flaws in it isn't doing science. A lot of federal grant money has gone into institutions that do just that, and I think it should be re-directed elsewhere. To, y'know, institutions that are actually going to do science.
Putting something in a journal is literally just publishing a result. It explicitly does not intrinsically carry notions of validity for the exact reasons you point out.
How are scientists supposed to share results in a way that doesn’t run the risk of someone else taking it as gospel, or even more likely: of someone on the internet thinking that the scientific community is taking it as gospel (which they’re generally not… again for the exact reasons you mention).
> How are scientists supposed to share results in a way that doesn’t run the risk of someone else taking it as gospel
Could not care less, but federal funding should be shifted to institutions that spend >X% (politically negotiable) of resources on replication.
And as a consideration for federal funding, groups that get federal funding, should be required to give first crack to journals that devote >X% of space to replication.
If people still want to only do novel studies, fine. I can't stop them. But we don't have to fund groups that don't go back and double check their work.
I agree with the target you’re shooting for here but I think it’s not nearly that simple to get there.
For example, you’d just have labs doing extremely expensive replications of extremely simple or well-established experiments. Why not?
IMO maybe an alternative solution: a government-run journal that 1) pays researchers handsome sums upon publication, 2) only publishes high-quality replications, and 3) only publishes replications that increase marginal confidence on a defensible important question.
That way this journal could pick up “negative results” and other “not-blockbuster” results that might come about as a byproduct of pursuing other research goals, and there’s no incentive to replicate meaningless work, and there’s no central planning required of the scientific endeavor (of which there’s already too much due to the funding mechanisms).
> For example, you’d just have labs doing extremely expensive replications of extremely simple or well-established experiments. Why not?
You're making grants sound like a cost-plus contract. I don't think grants currently work like that. Why would they be changed?
As to why that wouldn't happen under the current system. Because that lab would go under and before they published the replications (these things do get reviewed).
And after a certain number of replications, you would (presumably) stop funding those replications. Maybe re-visit it once every decade or so in the softer sciences. You never know what's a product of the current moment in something like sociology or psychology.
> IMO maybe an alternative solution: a government-run journal
I'd worry about inertia in a government run program. You can just point funding at a different institution when you're only talking about government funding, but when something is government run, it tends to be harder to kill than just re-directing funding.
I think you'd have to set up an entire ecosystem of government run journals, but that still makes it harder to pivot if one of the non-government run journals starts doing way better work.
This is disingenuous. Glorifying 'science' (which can be entirely shoddy to 'gold standard' and cover the whole gamut of garbage to spot on, which can change weekly) and dismissing cultural knowledge (i.e. how certain plants remedy ailments), generational knowledge (i.e. what weather changes mean), lived experience and non-accredited research because 'it's not science.'
You have to be critical of everything (reasonably), do your own research and come to your own conclusions. Or you can just believe that everything not 'published science' is wild internet crackpot theory if that makes life easier for you.
1. Science as an institution of academics, some of whom have demonstrably prioritized their career over doing their job (and even when that's not the case, has been shown to be wrong if you go back far enough to various scientific theories that were disproved by later discoveries), and...
2. Science as a process of inquiry that begins with an observation which leads to a hypothesis which is then put to the test through experimentation. This needn't be a process limited to academic science, either, but can be exercised in many areas of life.
I suspect we all generally agree that Science #1 should usually be taken with some salt (even in the best scenario, once you take science at its word, you've stopped doing science, though there are times, like gravity, when for practical purposes you can accept a high degree of technically-non-perfect certainty is close enough), and Science #2 is generally good for either reinforcing or correcting our understanding of the world.
You can watch videos of Jaguar going into the water and fishing out cayman. Why wouldn’t it be the same for dinosaurs? It’s only a matter of size and strength otherwise no taxonomy is magically safe from any other.
Otoh with the mammal smaller like that it seems maybe like it could be more self defense or trying to distract a predator from their young or something other then the mammal being the predator..
Pretty sure it would have gone both (all) ways where the opportunity arose just as it does between today's animals. I doubt people truely think that only dinosaurs were top predators across all sizes, groups and timeframes.
Yes, there is a reason: “The lack of bite marks on the dinosaur skeleton, the position of the mammal atop the dinosaur, and the grasping and biting actions of the mammal, collectively signal that the mammal was preying on the weakened dinosaur when the two were suddenly entombed by a volcanic debris flow,”
Can we tell whether the mammal was actually trying to take down a dinosaur, or it was merely scavenging on a (nearly) dead dinosaur? Signs of resistance on either of them?
It is possible that the mammal was scavenging the carcass of the dinosaur when the two became buried. This proposed scenario would account for the large size of the dinosaur relative to the mammal (terrestrial predators usually favour prey that are not much larger than themselves, particularly when hunting alone), and the fact that the mammal was biting the ribs of the dinosaur when it died, which would otherwise have been difficult to access (but not impossible—see below) on a living prey item. However, while plausible, we cite three lines of evidence that challenge this hypothesis. First, the bones of the dinosaur are otherwise devoid of tooth marks, which are commonly left by carnivorous mammals while scavenging. Second, it seems unlikely that the two animals would have become so entangled, were the dinosaur dead prior to the arrival of the mammal. Third, the scavenging scenario does not predict the position of the mammal atop the dinosaur, since the mammal could presumably just as easily have eaten the dinosaur from ground level.
We propose instead that the two animals were buried in an act of predation on the part of the mammal, only for both to have been entombed by a sudden lahar-type volcanic debris flow (Fig. 2). This hypothesis would explain the entwined nature of the skeletons, wherein the left hindfoot of the mammal became trapped within the folded left leg of the dinosaur when it collapsed to the ground. It would also account for the lack of tooth marks and other indications of scavenging on the dinosaur’s skeleton, and for the mammal’s position atop the dinosaur, as though to subdue its weakened prey.
In my opinion, it’s more likely that the mammal climbed the carcass to access meat that larger mammals already consumed from the ground level. Zero chance something this small is actively trying to take down prey as large as this.
Like assuming that based on some skeletons found under a volcanic ash flow that the normal behavior of humans was running with your hands in the air and screaming really loudly.