I was watching “Life on our Planet”, narrated by Morgan Freeman, and there was a segment about the fighting ritual that the, now extinct, terror birds did when two males fought. It was a very specific ritual.
How do scientists figure this kind of stuff out?
In: Biology
I have not watched the documentary you are referring to but in general there are several pieces of evidence that can be used to infer things like this.
In particular, scientists can try to infer the possible behaviors of extinct animals from living relatives. For instance, in other species (in [this case dinosaurs](https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/markings-on-rocks-in-colorado-a-likely-sign-of-dinosaur-mating-behavior/)), there are fossilized remains of footprints showing long grooves or scrapes. In that case, they resemble what would be produced by the scuffing produced by birds engaged in the same mating rituals and fighting today — so it seems likely that the T. rexes were doing something similar.
In some cases they don’t and are just guessing.
The fighting bit is usually easier. If they fight hard enough they might even leave physical evidence in fossils, but that is rare.
Most of the time they just look at fossils and compare them to living creatures and guess behavior based on anatomy.
You can look at animals alive today that for example ram their heads together when they fight and look at their skulls and what structures they have to protect their brains and not end up like a professional boxer or NFL player at the end of their career and compare those with what you see in fossils of creatures with interesting structures on their skulls.
You can look at how giraffes fight with each other with their necks and compare their necks with sauropods to see if they could maybe have done the same.
You can look at the tailspikes on a stegosaur (aka thagomizer after the lat Thag Simmons) and think to yourself, I bet those would have hurt if you were hit by them and speculate whether they might be used to fight predators or rivals or other animals. You study how flexible the tail would have been and where the muscles would have attached and how they might or might not have been able to move their legs to turn. And you also look if there are any fossils that have holes in them that would fit the spikes.
Much of it is guesswork, but a lot of that guesswork has had a lot of hard work put into it.
Well, they don’t KNOW the exact details of that sort of thing. It’s an educated guess with some license taken to bring the documentary to life.
It’s a combination of looking at behaviors or modern relatives or even just animals in similar niches and body types and the structure of their remains.
We know modern birds have extensive mating rituals and competitions and how those often look. We know what parts of their bodies were built to handle confrontations like that. Sometimes we find damage on the remains which matches the beaks/claws/horns/etc… of the same species.
The actual fight or ritual on screen in a documentary extrapolated from what we see today, plus anything we can figure out from the structures and any documented damage.
It *is* speculation, more so than many other things they do know about these animals. I wish popular science shows would be more upfront about what parts of the show are well-grounded and what parts are embellished or purely speculative.
But they’re not science journals after all, they’re entertainment programming, and the producers want to make it *more exciting* to keep people’s attention and to have more viewers. So I guess it’s not going away.
My kid has a dinosaur book that confidently states what the different dinos sounded like. And I can see that having the shape of various parts of a dinosaur could allow you to decently recreate an approximation of their sound, I do always make sure to say “we think” or “probably” when reading it to him.
There’s a couple of ways.
Some extinct species, we have seen in the past. They have gone extinct after scientists have documented their existence.
For much older species, we can make assumptions based on how the species that are related to them behave.
We can also reconstruct their skeletons from fossils and see how they move. We have studied a lot of skeletons, so we know how muscles and ligaments connect, so we can tell where their muscles were and how string they were beases on how the bones are shaped, so we can see which muscles they used a lot, so we know what they did.
We also find a lot of damaged skeletons from fossils. We can tell if the injuries were lethal or not depending if the edges of the injury has smoothed out, indicating healing.
We can usually figure out what caused the injury based on the shape of the injury and what other species were in the same time and place.
For example, we know ankylosaurs used their tails to fight with each other because we have found ankylosaur fossils with injuries that matched the same height and shape of an ankylosaur tail swing.
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