Fearsome Tyrannosaurs Were Social Animals, Study Suggests (Bob Whitby for Arkansas Research). A team from the University of Arkansas investigated bones found at a quarry in the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument.
“Localities [like Rainbows and Unicorns Quarry] that produce insights into the possible behavior of extinct animals are especially rare, and difficult to interpret,” said tyrannosaur expert Philip Currie in a press release from the BLM. “Traditional excavation techniques, supplemented by the analysis of rare earth elements, stable isotopes and charcoal concentrations convincingly show a synchronous death event at the Rainbows site of four or five tyrannosaurids. Undoubtedly, this group died together, which adds to a growing body of evidence that tyrannosaurids were capable of interacting as gregarious packs.”
That is a non-sequitur. That they died together does not mean that they lived together. They could have been lone hunters showing up at the watering hole when a flood came. Look what the burial evidence shows:
“We realized right away this site could potentially be used to test the social tyrannosaur idea. Unfortunately, the site’s ancient history is complicated,” Titus said. “With bones appearing to have been exhumed and reburied by the action of a river, the original context within which they lay has been destroyed. However, all has not been lost.” As the details of the site’s history emerged, the research team concluded that the tyrannosaurs died together during a seasonal flooding event that washed their carcasses into a lake, where they sat, largely undisturbed until the river later churned its way through the bone bed.
How often does a “seasonal flooding event” bury large, heavy animals? Floods can sweep animals together into channels even if they weren’t together when the flood started. And even if their carcasses were washed into a lake, it doesn’t mean that they would be buried and fossilized. Large carcasses normally decompose or are devoured by scavengers. If this had been a “seasonal flood” that occurred during millions of years of dinosaur life, there should be billions of dinosaur carcasses in the bone bed from millions of seasonal floods.
