Here is a good article from Skeptical Enquirer from 2010.
See, now, that wasnt hard now was it? And so much better than name calling.
Save your condescension. You are the one that brought up decade old, instantly questioned and 5 year demolished horseshit.
Moderator Note
Keep the commentary out of GQ and focus on the facts in your posts while in this forum. If you want to bicker, there’s always Great Debates or the Pit, depending on how civilized (or not, in the latter case) you want your arguments to be.
Weren’t there multiple cycles of saber-toothed cats evolving to prey on elephants/ mastodons, putting enough pressure on their prey that the prey went extinct in hard times, and thus the saber-tooths followed them, and then the whole cycle began again? Maybe we’re just in a down phase of the cycle.
For that matter Allosaurs went extinct only for Tyrannosaurs to evolve in their place. So maybe the same Red Queen race took place in the Mesozoic.
My point about grass was that there’s a lot more physical substance, it seems to me, in a large palm frond than in a field of grass or today’s smaller thinner deciduous tree leaves. Thus, it’s a lot more effort and takes much longer to graze the same amount of physical volume from modern plants compared to those palm-frond looking plants that seem to fill drawings of the dinosaur era. Palms today seem to be relegated to marginal niches compared to deciduous trees. Add to that the need to feed warm-blooded animals, and one limit to size likely is the ability to eat enough. perhaps.
Those “palms” are probably cycads. And tough and spiky. Eating cycads is a lot of work.
There’s actually no evidence that sabertooth predators specialized in proboscideans, and more evidence that they preyed on standard ruminants like bison and camels. They were a lot more heavily built than modern big cats, which means they didn’t run down their prey but were ambush predators.
We don’t have a good consensus as to exactly how the saber teeth were used to kill, but the killing was probably done very carefully and deliberately because those teeth were fairly delicate.
The thing to consider about plants is not how much plant material is there. Herbivores eat a lot, but they can’t just hoover up every plant. Plants can have chemical and physical defenses that make them impossible for most species to consume.
What you have to look at is not total plant biomass, but what fraction of that biomass can be eaten, and how quickly that consumed biomass is replaced.
So sure, a forest has more plant biomass than a grassland. But for modern grazers much more of that grass can be eaten, and grass is very productive and fast growing in the right conditions.
This is why grasslands can support huge populations of grazers, while forests have much smaller number of browsers.
But in any case, there was no such thing as grass back in the Mesozoic. So no grasslands at all. And when we look at sauropods, they didn’t chew at all. Whatever plants they ate just went right down the throat into the gizzard, which is where the preparation really happened. And the model that makes the most sense to me is that sauropods moved their bodies very very slowly, and just hoovered up everything by moving the neck. Then plant material is crushed by the gizzard, then to a gigantic fermentation chamber where the low-quality browse gets digested. And what goes in must come out, so a constant stream dinopatties out the back. Because their size makes them mostly immune to predation, they just ignore all other animals around, and barely pay attention to their surroundings, which is good because they have a brain the size of a walnut anyway. So probably something really inhuman and nothing like the herbivores of today.
As for egg laying, sauropod eggs were about the size of a cantaloupe. That’s about as big as an egg can get, but it’s very small relative the the body size of a sauropod. So they probably laid gigantic amounts of them, and flooded the area with baby sauropods, and all the predators gorged themselves until they couldn’t eat any more.
Did they ever solve the enigma of how something with a cloaca twelve feet off the ground laid eggs?
Possibly they just kneeled down a bit, like this: http://pre01.deviantart.net/d86f/th/pre/i/2012/240/7/2/could_sauropods_sit__by_palaeozoologist-d5cjfm4.jpg
Or maybe they had an extensible cloaca. It could have functioned as an ovipositor for the females and a penis for the males.
And what about the mammoths that lived hundreds of miles from the tundra?
There were various kinds of sabre-toothed cats, as well as sabre-toothed marsupials and theraspids. There is zero evidence that any of them drove their prey to extinction.
Allosaurs were not “replaced” by Tyrannosaurs in any meaningful sense. Allosaurs went extinct before Tyrannosaurs but the two groups overlapped for tens of millions of years.