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Thread: Predators with poor camouflage?
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2018-02-04, 10:07 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Apr 2013
Re: Predators with poor camouflage?
The feathers could be dull on the outside and vibrantly coloured on the inside, only showing their feathery glory when raised erect. This could occur during mating displays (because that's what they are there for) and when it attacks adventurers (because it looks cool and once it lunges it doesn't need to be hidden).
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2018-02-05, 06:23 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Oct 2014
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- Tulips Cheese & Rock&Roll
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Re: Predators with poor camouflage?
The Hindsight Awards, results: See the best movies of 1999!
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2018-02-05, 08:48 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Jul 2014
Re: Predators with poor camouflage?
just a thought, it could be that movement is what allows some predators to distinguish between a tree and a meal.
the first half of the meaning of life is that there isn't one.
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2018-02-06, 01:45 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Oct 2014
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- Tulips Cheese & Rock&Roll
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Re: Predators with poor camouflage?
That's true for all predators, to an extend. You have an easier time spotting a hare in a field when it's running.
Tyrannosaurus in particular has very large eyes, placed frontally, far apart with good overlap. If his brain was somehow wired for any sort of bad eyesight, even as a way to spare processing powers for other things, it would be a serious waste of some great eyes. The placement of the eyes would have made it particularly good at judging close by distances. For us binocular vision helps in seeing depth up to a few meters away, that would be dozens of meters with the size of rexie's head. That's the sort of depth vision it uses on things that are relative to its own size right in front of it. Like uneven ground it wants to run across, or animals leaping away from its jaws or fighting back. In us the overlapping frontal eyes evolved for leaping around in trees, the adaption doesn't have to mean an animal was a predator. This does seem the most likely explanation though on a creature with such relatively small arms and a size squarely in the "no tree climbing" range.
(Many birds also use movement to judge depth, but they can use their own movement and they only need to do this because they're looking at stuff with one eye. Taking two shots with one eye in principal gives the same information as looking with two eyes. And that's why chickens and pigeons walk weird like that.)Last edited by Lvl 2 Expert; 2018-02-07 at 04:07 PM.
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2018-02-07, 03:59 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jan 2006
- Location
- Protecting my Horde (yes, I mean that kind)
Re: Predators with poor camouflage?
Its also because most birds don't have muscles to move the eye much, if at all. So they constantly have to move their heads to keep things in view and change focus. Unlike most simians which have very good muscle movement behind the eye and allow humans, and other apes, to track objects without necessarily moving our heads. This is the reason that owls have that weird stare and rotate their heads nearly 360 degrees by the way. Obligatory owl rap: R-r-r-otate your owl.
Last edited by Beleriphon; 2018-02-07 at 04:00 PM.
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2018-02-08, 10:52 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Oct 2010
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- Dallas, TX
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Re: Predators with poor camouflage?
It's worth noting that the size of the predator / scavenger depends in large part on the size of the food. A predator the size of a T. Rex could scavenge from today's road kill. She would need to scavenge from bodies the size of a Triceratops. But they had that option.
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2018-02-08, 11:48 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Oct 2014
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- Tulips Cheese & Rock&Roll
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Re: Predators with poor camouflage?
Larger prey just means less prey per square kilometer. Neither creature speed nor distance traveled per day nor distance over which something can be smelled scale linear with creature size let alone weight or apetite, so since there are no present day land based primary scavengers over the size of a large beetle or something a beast the size of rex is not going to be able to survive that way either. No matter how large the prey animals. If anything it would do better if all the prey was the size of a cow: it provides as much food as rex can eat in one sitting but there can be more of them, and thus more death ones, per square kilometer than would be the case with larger prey.
Last edited by Lvl 2 Expert; 2018-02-08 at 11:50 AM.
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2018-02-13, 11:50 PM (ISO 8601)
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- May 2011
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- Australia
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Re: Predators with poor camouflage?
Related: I remember a scientific paper that posited that they were actually an anti-Ceratopsian specialist, and they had the highest bite strength of any carnosaur. But I will note that very few predators would actually pass up carriorn.
Also, prey species that are highly poisonous tend to be brightly colors, so predators realise they're poisonous and leave them alone. This may just be me being gonzo, but I am highly amused by a) the idea of poisonous carnosaurs and b) a predator big enough to regularly target carnosaurs. But it's easily the least logical option here.
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2018-02-14, 01:53 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Oct 2014
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- Tulips Cheese & Rock&Roll
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Re: Predators with poor camouflage?
Quick question: what's the definition of carnosaur here? Because that last bit about poisonous carnosaurs hunting other carnosaurs by being big confuses me. It's about meat eating theropods?
The Hindsight Awards, results: See the best movies of 1999!
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2018-02-14, 02:30 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Feb 2007
Re: Predators with poor camouflage?
I think is true that there was a healed Triceratops as well as a healed hadrosaur bone found, with bite marks suggestive of T. rex.
I presume they're using ye olde definition that just meant "big theropods".
The modern definition just refers to allosauroids (since T. rex is not an allosauroid, I presumed it was the old term they were using, for convenience)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CarnosauriaLast edited by hamishspence; 2018-02-14 at 02:32 AM.
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2018-02-15, 10:43 PM (ISO 8601)
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- May 2011
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- Australia
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Re: Predators with poor camouflage?
Yeah, I meant "Just the big theropods". Paleontology evolves very quickly, considering it's all about extinct organisms.
So the idea I was postiting was that the multicolored T.Rexs are like that to warn their even bigger predators that they're poisonous. Because in a D&D-style universe, there are probably a few creatures that would actually qualify a T.Rex as a "light snack."
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2018-02-15, 11:01 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jul 2015
Re: Predators with poor camouflage?
Paleontology actually evolves very slowly, compared to most other biological sciences. Paleotological papers regularly cite sources from many decades ago, which would be unimaginable in a field like genetics or even ecology. The paleontology of dinosaurs happens to evolve much more rapidly because there's a disproportionate amount of money in it and because the fossil record is so comparatively poor that it is particularly vulnerable to new fossil evidence.
Biological classification in general has been evolving rapidly for the past few decades due to the combination of the cladistics revolution with high end statistical number crunching, but that's largely a temporary blimp and many groups are starting to settle down now.