Prey bone utilization by predatory dinosaurs

Abstract

Many mammalian predators chew and crush bone to various degrees during their utilization of a prey carcass, leaving tooth marks on the prey bones as evidence of their activity. Recognition of similar types of tooth marks on dinosaur bones provides a means to evaluate the degree to which predatory dinosaurs were capable of prey bone utilization. A survey of 858 dinosaur prey bones from six dinosaur localities in Wyoming, Utah and Montana, has shown the frequencies of tooth-damaged bone range from 0.0% to 4.0%. Compared to bone assemblages in which there is a strong inference of mammalian scavenging, the frequencies of tooth-marked bone from the dinosaur localities are decidedly less common. Theropod dinosaur feeding behaviors were probably more similar to Komodo monitor behavior observed in the monitor communities of Indonesia, than for mammalian-based communities. The results of this survey indicate that bone crushing was not employed by predatory dinosaurs during their utilization of prey carcasses. The routine crushing of bone, then, as a means of obtaining further nutrients contained within a prey carcass was not an ecological or functional phenomenon present in the Mesozoic and was only developed later by mammalian predators in the Cenozoic.