Fossilized Function and Behavior
9:41 am
The big paleo news this week is the description of an 11 foot (3.5 meter) Cretaceous snake, Sanajeh indicus, found coiled around a dinosaur nest—apparently lying in wait for when the hard-to-swallow eggs revealed their bite-sized contents. The paper is freely accessible at PLoS Biology, and microecos and SV-POW both have worthy takes on the topic.
Less-well publicized but just as interesting is the PLoS Biology’s “primer” article on Studying Function and Behavior in the Fossil Record by Michael Benton. It provides an overview of three lines of evidence that can lead to testable hypotheses about ancient behavior: empirical evidence, comparison with modern animals, and biomechanical modeling. For each of these approaches, examples are pulled from paleontological (mostly dinosaur) research over the past decade. There is, I suspect, a lot more that could be said on the topic of inferring behavior from fossils, but this brief is a useful companion piece to the Sanajeh paper and I’d certainly recommend taking a look at it.
In other news of fossilized behavior, my posting will be a bit petrified this week as I push forward on another project—more Coelophysis posts are in the works, however, and I should have one or more to put up next week…
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