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
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.
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