HORNY ALIEN vegetarian monsters once ROAMED CANADA Paleoboffins have discovered a new terrifying, alien, twin horned dinosaur that roamed the earth 78 million years ago. Artist's impression of Xenoceratops Who're you calling alien horned face? Credit: Julius T. Csotonyi The newly named Xenoceratops foremostensis was around 20 feet long, weighed two tons and is the oldest …
FFS! Being "vegetarian" is an ethical position - an active choice made by a person to eschew eating meat or animal-derived products. I think you'll find that dinosaurs (or indeed any other animal) do not actively choose one way or the other and that the word "herbivore" is what you're looking for in this case.
" Do you think the dinos didn't have ethics? Prove It!"
Dinoursoars with Ethics, from Essex? (waking up from a long snooze)
Bunch of oiks. Glad they're extinct. (Back to sleep...)
Oh, can someone open the Thames barrier next week? Full tide. That'll flush their ethics out. Ta muchly.
(Back to sleep...)
'Given the expenditure of energy needed to haul around all that plate armor, Xeno C must have found the Canada of its days full of some seriously rough predatorial neighbours.'
They had to deal with the Canadian members of the Tyrannosauridae family, which like modern Canadians are less terrifying than their American neighbours, but still included the delightfully betoothed Gorgosaurus:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgosaurus_libratus
That's a pattern of horns intended for fighting with another beastie with a similar pattern of horns, i.e. they were territorial or competing for mates, rather than defending against a differently tooled-up predator like a tyrannosaur. In that sense it's like a pair of antlers, good when up against another pair, but a bit useless otherwise.
If you can imagine two of these facing off, then the smaller horns are in the right places for eye-gouging action, the large pair at the top are good for leverage to prise the large defensive plate upwards and do damage to the softer parts around the opponent's neck. The small stud-like horn appendages around the rim of the shield are there to impede an opponent from sliding his horns around the edge to where he can get an advantage.
If you can't visualise how this would play out, get a decent 3D sculpting app (such as ZBrush) and a 3D printer, model it, print out a couple of copies and test how a fight would go.
> Me: What color[sic] were dinosaurs?
White and pink with a little tattoo on the rump.
Plus, they had delicate fleshy webs between those horns so that they could cool themselves, rather like elephant ears.
Not so terrible now, are they?
That's good. I wonder what's the percentage of what they now know compared to what was? Is it 50%, or 0.005%? Has anyone even estimated this ratio? I suspect it's much lower than anyone might think.
The point being: the overly detailed descriptions of what was going on way back then must be inaccurate.
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