STL Science Center

STL Science Center

11 November 2013

Disney Has Fun

A minute into the Dinosaur! ride at Disney's Animal Kingdom an Alioramus rears back and ingests what is supposed to be a Champsosaurus according to the accounts I have read. The only real problem with that is that Champsosaurus is a North American genus that, to my knowledge, has no representative species seen in Asia where Alioramus resided. Regardless, the long snouted Alioramus digging into the ground to pull out the long bodied Champsosaurus kind of meshes well with the statement made Saturday that the long snout allows for extension into cavities, though body cavities not caves and caverns, in search of food. Regardless, digging for food was probably not the primary means of extracting prey items for a dinosaur with a long snout based on its shortened forelimbs. As hypothesized earlier, the snout was probably used as the primary weapon, inflicting quick and sudden bites on prey items during hunting expeditions. The idea that the elongate snout could be used for digging or extracting animals from crevices, while not entirely farcical, would most likely have been a last ditch attempt at procuring food items.

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