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
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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