Episode #480 from 2:10:05
Spinosaurus
We've got, oh, at least a dozen good specimens of it by now and multiple ones with stomach contents. There's one I've described with a little mammal foot inside it, there's one with a bird inside it, there's one with a lizard inside it, and there's one with a fish inside it. On their own, and this happened for at least two of the papers describing these things, it's like, "It ate fish. These are fish-eating animals." No, that one ate one fish once. That one ate one bird once, that one ate one mammal once, and that one ate one lizard once. So what have we actually got here? I suspect we've got a group of generalists and we just happen to have found them eating different things at different times. But equally, it's also possible, at least, that, yeah, this is one of these things and it had learned to eat fish when the others hadn't, and actually this was mostly fish eaters and the others ate whatever they could get. Maybe one caught a bird up a tree in a nest, maybe one found it dead on the ground. You don't really know what one of these things on its own is fascinating, but potentially misleading.
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We've got, oh, at least a dozen good specimens of it by now and multiple ones with stomach contents. There's one I've described with a little mammal foot inside it, there's one with a bird inside it, there's one with a lizard inside it, and there's one with a fish inside it. On their own, and this happened for at least two of the papers describing these things, it's like, "It ate fish. These are fish-eating animals." No, that one ate one fish once. That one ate one bird once, that one ate one mammal once, and that one ate one lizard once. So what have we actually got here? I suspect we've got a group of generalists and we just happen to have found them eating different things at different times. But equally, it's also possible, at least, that, yeah, this is one of these things and it had learned to eat fish when the others hadn't, and actually this was mostly fish eaters and the others ate whatever they could get. Maybe one caught a bird up a tree in a nest, maybe one found it dead on the ground. You don't really know what one of these things on its own is fascinating, but potentially misleading.
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