Photograph of the skeletal mount of Allosaurus specimen AMNH 5753, from William Diller Matthew's 1915 Dinosaurs. Credit: Project Gutenberg e-book, Wikimedia Commons, CC0 (creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)
Phys.org has a story about Jurassic dinosaurs and the ecosystem they lived in. A paper published in the journal PLOS One looks at the ultimate fate of giant dinosaur carcasses. The authors' hypothesis was that carnivorous dinosaurs evolved to take advantage of the available food resource provided by the large carcasses of sauropods and other dinosaurs. To test this idea, the researchers created an agent-based model that simulated the Jurassic-aged ecosystem, which was preserved in the Morrison Formation in Colorado. Allosaurus lived alongside large sauropods with medium sized dinosaurs like Stegosaurus.
In the model, carnivores (intended to simulate allosaurs) were assigned traits that would improve their hunting or scavenging abilities while obtaining energy from meat sources (simulating living prey or sauropod carcasses).
The model measured the evolutionary fitness of these simulated carnivores and found that, when large sources of sauropod carrion were available, scavenging was more profitable than hunting, suggesting that carnivores in such ecosystems might have evolved specialized traits to help them detect and exploit large carcasses.
The authors stress that this model represents a simplified abstract of a complex system, and that the results might be altered with the inclusion of more variables, such as additional dinosaur species or features of the life history of the simulated dinosaurs. They note that models like this might improve our understanding of how the availability of carrion can influence the evolution of predators.
