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
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.
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