okay seriously though where’s the proof that velociraptor and other dromeosaurs were pack hunters?
There sort of… really isn’t any. That kind of behavior isn’t something that can directly fossilize. I think mainly it’s a combination of the dinosaur renaissance pushing for “fast, active, and intelligent” portrayals, and general Rule Of Cool, resulting in them being popularly interpreted as the dino equivalent of wolves.
Pack hunting is very rare in their modern avian relatives, however – the Harris’s hawk is the best-known example. We have fossils of Deinonychus associated with Tenontosaurus, but correlation doesn’t equal causation – we don’t know if they actually killed prey that large, or if they were just opportunistically mobbing a carcass. The only solid evidence for social behavior comes
from some fossil footprints in China, which show six unknown dromaeosaurs moving in a group.More recent research suggests that dromaeosaurs used their “killing claws” to pin down smaller prey in a similar manner to modern hawks and eagles. Not the sort of hunting that would require complex pack cooperation.
(Plus their legs weren’t at all proportioned for running, suggesting they actually moved much slower than popular portrayals.)
This post raises a lot of good points, but it makes a common speculative-paleontology mistake – lumping together all members of a taxonomic family and assuming that they acted or behaved identically. Saying “dromaeosaurs weren’t pack hunters” is like saying “Members of the family Felidae aren’t pack hunters”, when in reality, dromaeosaurs and felines are both highly diverse families with dozens of different members that kill their prey in a wide variety of ways.
You wouldn’t look at a tiger and a bobcat and assume they hunted and fed identically, and so the same logic shouldn’t be applied to dromaeosaurs so vastly different in size and native biome (not to mention point in history) as Deinonychus and Achillobator. Unfortunately, a lot of paleontologists do, on both sides of the argument – there are those who take the pack-hunting approach to a ridiculous extreme, illustrating Deinonychus swarming by the dozens over ornithopods ten times their size like some sort of cartoonish feathery land-piranha, and there are apparently those who envision Achillobator as some kind of monstrously sized sluggish chicken, unable to catch or feed on anything but the weakest and dumbest of prey.
Which leads into another questionable thing in this post: the assumption that dromaeosaurs acted exactly like their living relatives. Not only are dromaeosaurs not the dinosaurs most closely related to birds (that would be the troodontids), but that idea doesn’t even make any sense: why would an eleven-foot-long land-bound carnivore hunt in a way that at all resembles that of a foot-long flying animal? Assuming that dromaeosaurs would act in ways identical to modern birds is the easy way out.
The reality of the situation is that dinosaurs probably acted in ways not like any living animal – because the dinosaurs themselves weren’t like any living animal. They weren’t hawks and eagles. They weren’t crocodiles or Komodo dragons. They weren’t monsters and dragons, either. They were an entirely unique class of animals filling an incredibly diverse array of ecological niches, inhabiting every modern continent for more than 180 million years – and it sometimes does them an incredible disservice to pigeonhole them into the limited roles we can think of for them.
definitely the best answer so far.
i made the original post because i’m tired of seeing claims being made for animals whose behavior we just can’t study. we have clues, and speculation, but it’s impossible to definitively say that such and such dinosaur acted like like this or that.
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